Garden Walls
by KendrixTermina
Summary: Little side story intended to somewhat dissect the rivalry between Keith and Lance. Of impenetrable walls, irreconceilable differences, insurmountable distance and a frustratingly diffuse sense of purpose.
1. Blurryface

I.

 _Lance has his good days, but he has bad days, too._

Let there be no wrong impression: The Blue Paladin cared deeply about his teammates and on their quest to liberate the universe, he'd shared many irreplaceable moments with them.

But he had bad days, too.

In part, it was simply to be expected given that he was only human, and at that, one who had only recently gone from being an unpromising space academy reject to being caught at the center of an age old intergalactic war, cut off from everything he had ever known, but more specifically, his current mood had taken a turn for the sour earlier this day, when his hopes to squeeze in a little R&R into the whole 'defender of the universe' schedule had been rudely dashed –

As if it were his fault that he was the only one around here who liked to spend his precious, limited chill time actually _relaxing_ instead of, say, disassembling machines or showing off on the training deck, or perhaps simply because he didn't excuse himself fast enough, he'd found himself once again recruited by Coran to help with various maintenance tasks around the castle, which, in itself, wouldn't have been _that_ bad – in the end, it was something that needed doing, and generally, he found the company of the older Altean agreeable enough, having establishes a good enough rapport despite their differing backgrounds.

It was more about a casual comment he'd made about everyone having to contribute their best, and how it has connected with a chain of thoughts that had been idling around at the back of the Blue Paladin's mind for some time now – though he might protest it in jest, he couldn't _truly_ deny that kicking back with some tunes was less important than any of the more productive tasks his fellow Paladins had taken up.

He could argue that a good dose of chillaxation had a positive impact on his personal equilibrium, but he was aware that it didn't contribute to their survival the same way as, for example, Pidge's tinkering – and on a better day he might have concluded that this left him free to help whoever needed an extra hand, stated that he was conserving his energy or gone to the training deck for some compensatory target practice, but today, the sinking feeling that came with contemplating his dubious role in the team just ended up nudging a bunch of free-floating associations about how everything reminded him just how out of place he felt, and by extension, just how far he was from what he once called home.

And once he'd gone far enough on that train of thought, it was hard to muster the enthusiasm necessary to appreciate whatever Coran was rambling on about – Lance had adjusted well enough to thinking in ticks, vargas and doboshes and even thought he'd picked up the basics about the various Altean creatures that the castle's original inhabitants kept referring to, but on days like these, all those mentions of different time units, alien creatures and the constant stream of anecdotes featuring various outer space mischief from faraway times just represented pricks that kept him away to the distance between his current whereabouts and any frames of reference he'd ever known before;

Of course, he'd expected to be away from home for a while when he signed up for the Galaxy Garrison, and at first, he'd fared well enough on the homesickness front, his mind far too occupied by dreams of fame of glory, but now, even tiny details he'd taken for granted without a thought since he was a little boy were now replaced by unfamiliar words; For the last seventeen years of his life, he'd never ventured beyond the Earth's orbit, and the most he'd hoped to see in the absolute best case was the rest of his solar system; He'd had half an idea of becoming a renowned ace pilot and perhaps striking it rich as an asteroid miner later on, and he would have considered his life pretty much complete if he'd found himself chosen for a mission meant to venture to the outer edges of the solar system, but that boundary would have represented the edge of the world as far as he was concerned – what was once considered the furthest frontier of exploration was now part of Earth's most immediate neighborhood, now that his life took place at scales encompassing large parts of the known universe because he'd flown his way to a marvelous, mystical craft left behind by an ancient civilization – mystical in the most literal sense because as it would turn out, magic was real, too.

Just a few months ago, he hadn't known if aliens were real and considered the whole concept somewhat outlandish – Now, Lance usually encountered minimum of two and a half aliens every day, and one of them frequently enlisted his help to scrub various futuristic contraptions that, for all their advances, apparently still required scrubbing.

All things considered, he didn't resent this activity _that_ much, he understood the need for everyone to participate to the best of their ability, irrespective of whatever that happened to be or whether the tasks required were particularly glorious, he was glad if he could contribute _somehow_ , but he _wanted_ to contribute, something that couldn't just be done by everyone else – It wasn't just a matter of his superficial pride: Hunk's personal niche of taking over the kitchen, being the best defensive fighter, a skilled engineer, the cautious one with the common sense and the one dishing out the emotional support whenever Shiro was otherwise occupied might not have been exactly 'glamorous', but it was irreplaceable and no one in the team would want to be without him, least of all Lance himself, who'd considered the Yellow Paladin his best friend even before they'd all embarked on their unexpected intergalactic adventure.

As for him? He supposed he was a good shot and had a cool frost ray, and he liked to _think_ he was the funny one, but as he scrubbed away at the ancient crystalline machinery, he once again found himself wondering if the others saw it that way.

Coran, for his part, seemed too absorbed in the incident he was recounting to take note of the Blue Paladin's vaguely dejected state, perhaps not registering it as more than an understandable and not unusual lack of enthusiasm that might be remedied with even taller tales, and Lance wasn't sure if he resented or appreciated this.

Had he been in a better mood he might have joined in with some yarn of his own or at least tried to sneak in a funny comeback or two, and the time would have flown by in an instant despite being filled with drudge work, but right now, the Altean's chipper accounts just reinforced the sense of distance , disconnect and loneliness Lance was experiencing at the moment.

He knew, of course, that Coran tried his best, and that he, too must be missing his home; He was practical about things and focused his attention on looking after Allura and continuing their mission, but even so there were moments where he would have a distant look in his eyes whose meaning seemed universal – Compared to what he and the Princess had gone through, Lance's own homesickness seemed almost like a frivolous, pusillanimous complaint, after all, the Earth was still very much out there, and whether it would stay that way was up to their actions; If he wanted to set foot there again, the logical thing to do was to suck it up and scrub whatever needed to be scrubbed.

He understood this, and so that was what he did, but the resignation this entailed added to his bitterness – by the time the onerous task was done with & Lance was released to enjoy himself at last, he was no longer really in the mood to do so.

Excusing himself with a few vague, mumbled words without noting the half-puzzled, half-concerned look that was shot after him, he left the room with no clear intention of where to go – on a better day, he would have gone to find one of his teammates and the ensuing antics would surely have tipped his thoughts into another direction, but from his current, jade-colored vision, he only forsaw himself annoying and pestering them, or otherwise keeping them from their More Relevant Activities, besides, the prospect didn't seem as appealing as it otherwise might;

Lance cared deeply about his teammates, but he had his bad days, and on those, he would keenly feel the differences that existed between them. Allura existed in a completely different context than him to begin with, and in a different way, so did Shiro, though he wouldn't want to call attention to that sentiment in the man's presence; Some things about him could be strange and unsettling sometimes, marred by a past that none of his teammates had access to, but most importantly, none of this was his fault and if Lance's admiration for him had changed at all after he'd come to get know him, it would have been in the manner of a clear increase; Besides, he'd _immediately_ pick up on his fellow paladin's distemper and ask him to talk about it, and he wasn't sure whether he wanted to be in that situation at the moment.

Usually, he'd always find respite in his friends Pidge and Hunk, whom he'd known from his days at the garrison, but when he pictured them now, he imagined Pidge bent over her laptop, immersed in some topic or the other as if she were as if she were half absorbed into a walled-off space where there was only her and the latest object of her fascination, as impenetrable as the string of nerd words she'd be sure to sprout if he were to address her, only to be reminded that he didn't understand it.

On the other hand, there was Hunk, who, while a brilliant engineer in his own right, tended to express his ideas in more simple terms that went with his more down-to-earth, common-sense-ey way of thinking and could generally be relied upon for some earnest, good-natured support... but it was precisely because of his unpretentious, accepting nature that he wouldn't really understand or fathom Lance's predicament; He was the sort of person who could be content just being surrounded with harmony, friendship and the safety to live another day... well, that, and an abundance of decent snacks.

Hearing him rave about food sounded little more appealing than Pidge's excited nerd ravings; It would just remind him that they both had worlds of their own, things he couldn't understand and made them feel as distant as Coran's ramblings of distant times and alien worlds, even though they were both through and through ordinary, red-blooded, flesh-and blood humans much like himself.

As distinct as they might be from each other's, they had their own roles, niches and strengths where he was still looking for his own specialties and he even thought he was succeeding in parts, if Shiro's recent acknowledgments were something to go by, but one could not look at his teammates and picture them playing any other role than what they did;

Between their talents, personality and inclinations, their places in the team's structure seemed inevitable, almost like a kind of destiny, all the while Lance was still trying to carve out his own.

It wasn't even that he didn't see or know that his teammates did not mind him just as he was, or that they cared for him just as his birth family had; It was that he _wanted_ to be more than this, to be _someone_ , just like Shiro and the others – why else would a person with a comfortable life and a warm, close-knit family leave their beloved home in search of fame and adventure?

In truth it had taken him a while to put a name and label to this need, simply followed one juicy opportunity after another with his characteristic openness, be it a poster for a space recruitment program or an ancient magitech lion telling him to guide her home, but as he'd had more time to think about it and as he continued along this path, he was forced to consider what he was even doing here.

Well, what were any of them doing here?

Shiro and Allura had experienced the brutality of the empire firsthand at great personal cost, long since involved in this strife as part of something bigger than themselves by the time they crossed his path; Meanwhile, Pidge and Keith had already been pursuing quests of their own, _on_ their own, each of them with their own methods, heroes of another story until their stories intersected.

The team member whose situation was the closest to Lance's own was probably Hunk – He loved to talk about himself while the Yellow Paladin had been content to listen, so it was hardly surprising that the flow of information had mainly gone in one direction – besides, the stocky mechanic was an uncomplicated, humble person not in the business of drawing attention to himself, but even so, Lance had picked up on his occasional mentions of still having living relatives on Earth that he probably still missed every bit as much as Lance himself missed his own;

Like any normal person suddenly thrown into a crazy, out-of-this world situation, he was at first none too enthusiastic about being conscripted to fight in a war he'd never signed on for once the initial novelty of aliens and mythical robot creatures had worn off – It was witnessing the suffering of those conquered by Zarkon and his earnest, sincere intention to protect them that made him choose to stay.

But Lance had been different; Though he'd hidden it better, he'd hadn't had a much easier time adjusting to being out here on his own than Hunk did, not after being ejected from his once comfortable life, but even so, he'd been positively hyped about the whole space magic part, and eagerly jumped into the role of the dashing adventurer, or the best affectation thereof he could conjure, for as much as becoming a Paladin had disrupted his life, it also represented an even greater opportunity at what he'd likely been seeking when he'd signed up for the garrison in the first place: A destiny of his own.

He thought he'd find a continuation to his big dreams of outer space, but now that he'd found his way here, he almost wished he was back to those days when his mother's lap was the center of his world and its edges didn't extend very far past the nearby seashore, only a few minutes away from the family home -

And yet, he could not go back. Not because he was forced to stay, but because he _wanted_ to, for the team, for the cause, for himself, and that, unfortunately, was probably the harder thing to remedy.

So he'd stayed behind, but when he was finally free to go (from the space chores, not to Earth), his steps through the castle ship's corridors were as aimless as he perceived himself to be in this moment, extending from their uncertain ping-pong journey back to various less than stellar attempts to stand out and make a name for himself, wandering, dithering, vaguely staying away from areas he'd expect to be in use, until a sound caught his ear.


	2. All The Love In The World

II. (All The Love In The World)

 _An encounter on the training deck adds insult to injury._

Figures.

On a better day, the sound that distracted the Blue Paladin from his heavy thought might have been a source of respite, but today, the powers that be seemed astonishingly determined to rub in it.

Still half spaced out and welcoming distraction, Lance's fingers found their way to the door switch before he'd fully realized where his idle mind had taken him, though this was quickly remedied when the entrance slid open, revealing perhaps the last person he wanted to see right now – Which may have been a bit of a dramatic exaggeration, but not wholly without reason;

At the very least, he needn't worry about alerting the occupant of the room, for he was quite engrossed in his current activity, namely 'hitting the training deck' as he liked to call it.

For all it mattered, Lance and the rest of the universe that contained him might as well not have existed, everything faded except for a single-minded focus on the gladiator bot and the challenge it represented.

And sure, they were supposed to be getting along, and Lance would even say that they _had_ , even beyond what was dictated by necessity, but this was just unfair, especially on a day like this.

But was there anything about the Red Paladin that wasn't unfair? He was unfair just by existing.

Keith was without a doubt, the team's second-best fighter aside from Shiro ( perhaps thir best if one counted Allura, but there was no comparision to those two given how much more experience they had) and as if this weren't enough for him, he spent every free minute on the training deck dueling the gladiator bot, to see if maybe just maybe he could get even more ridiculous with his swordplay.

Lance duly noted that he wasn't using his usual weapon, finding the red Bayard not too far from his own feet, casually placed near the entrance of the room – instead, he seemed to be trying to get a hang of the shiny new toy he'd obtained at the Blade of Marmora headquarters – In a fashion. Supposedly, he'd had this mysterious knife all along, but it was only recently that he'd learn how to flip it on so to speak, and by the looks of it, he seemed intent on making good use of it as if to strike pride in the ghosts of whatever ancestors of his he had inherited it from, and though he ought to have been relatively new to that thing, Lance could already tell that he was taking to it like a fish to water, though he supposed that there would be some carryover from the skills that Keith's Bayard-Sword required.

If Lance had some sense in him, he would turn, leave and find something else to do that didn't involve depressing himself even further and possibly risking awkward conversations, but his eyes were apparently feeling masochistic today as they simply refused to look away.

The red Paladin had taken off the obnoxious, eye-grabbing red vest he usually wore, remaining in the simple black T-shirt he tended to wear underneath but keeping his fingerless gloves on for practicality and traction, presenting a needlessly dramatic spectacle unbecoming for a training simulation, all while still ostensibly unaware that he had an audience; If anything, he acted even more over-the-top when he thought he was alone, virtually throwing himself at the training bot amid shouts of ferocious beserker rage, relentlessly hacking away at his opponent.

It was almost a little frightening, honestly, Lance seriously wondered what in the universe he was trying to prove with this – and just how high had he set the difficulty, anyways? That robot was moving _fast_ and if would have been one thing if Keith were shrugging it off, but he did seem genuinely challenged by the struggle of keeping up, though he was very much holding his own overall – did he just grow bored if he wasn't actively struggling to catch his breath, or was this another example of Keith's usual recklessness?

Either way, the ensuing sight had Lance reflexively twitching or slightly backing away at times – Rather like his designated Lion, Keith was endowed with an almost unreal degree of agility, resulting in a very fast-paced battle. He would jump, swerve and even slide close to the floor a few times, always narrowly chased by the gladiator's weapon, yet always landing on his feet with an almost feline accuracy, but none of the grace one might have attributed to such a creature; Instead, he resembled a barely contained wild thing, relentless in his strife even when he found himself thrown against the walls or the floor by the force of barely-parried blows whose kinetic energy he didn't always fully succeed in counteracting.

It would be one thing if he were just wholly dominating this simulation, but that wasn't the case: Instead, he was genuinely pushing himself, perhaps preferring a 'Sink or Swim' approach to mastering his new weapon; Even so, he was still very much in his element here, perhaps more so than he would have been if he'd been more measured, thriving off the challenge itself.

It was really quite annoying, as far as Lance was concerned, and still, he couldn't help but experience a pang of jealousy, especially in moments like these – One look at the Red Paladin and you'd know for certain that he belonged here and that he had his role in the struggle for the universe, especially now that he was swinging around his Magical Destiny Dagger – At times, his movements were too fast for Lance's eyes to follow every detail, at least not without making himself dizzy.

Moreover, he still didn't seem to have taken notice of Lance's presence, remaining wholly immersed in the microcosm between himself and the gladiator bot, his consciousness little more than a series of in-the-moment reactions following from each other, existing from one breath to the next as their weapons made contact again again – Even as a mere observer, it was hard not to get drawn in by the display, the way he swirled around and dodged, yet always returned to swift offense that was starkly superhuman in its relentlessness, punctuated by occasional grunts of exertion as the combatants darted across the room.

One moment he'd be to the left of the doorway Lance was somehow still lounging around in, and in the next, he'd be to his left, parrying another blow with his fancy new plaything, face strained with determination – or perhaps he wasn't.

Perhaps it was because his fighting style involved relying on muscle memories that were largely adapted to the larger, heavier blade of his bayard, or maybe he'd simply allowed his focus to slip for a moment, be it due to getting carried away or finally growing somewhat tired, but either way, for a moment, Keith seemed to have overestimated the amount of resistance his weapon would put up against the training bots, with the result that the knife in question was catapulted away from his grasp, leaving him exposed to the mechanical gladiator which was already readying its next strike –

At this point, Lance actually let out a small gasp of worry, at least in terms of an involuntary knee jerk reaction, while his fellow Paladin solved the issue somewhat inelegantly by diving to the side, meting a wall of the room with a somewhat inelegant thud, but making use of it all the same as he reached behind his back to steady himself – He'd reacted fast, but it was apparent that Keith had been caught of his guard here.

Lance had half a mind of intervening, but he needn't have worried – any intentions of participating he might have had were disrupted by questions of what Keith was doing and finally dispersing by the realization of the answer, and by the time he'd grasped what he was going to do, his fellow paladin had already launched himself off the wall, sticking close to the ground as he darted towards his weapon with the slightest of smirks on his lips like a carnivorous something closing in on its prey.

He grasped it, using the hand that was nearest to it with little regards as to which one it was, and then, in that one, same flowing spiral movement, turned around to stop his opponent in its tracks before it could fully execute its last strike, landing a blow that, if its opponent had been an organic creature, would have slit open its throat.

As a reward, Keith was quickly congratulated by a computer voice much in the manner of a video game, minus the celebratory jingle:

"TRAINING LEVEL FIVE COMPLETED."

Victorious, he watched the gladiator robot shutting down and didn't allow himself to relax until it had fallen silent; Then, his blade shrank back down to its original size (no pause taken to figure out how that worked, let alone anything resembling a 'how do I shoot web' moment, not for Keith) and was placed back on his utility belt, and only then did he take a moment to suck in a few long, deep breaths, showing the exhaustion that would have logically resulted from all his exertion and taking a moment to wipe the sweat from his brow.

Then, in a spinning movement that was still unsurprisingly energetic he turned to where he'd left his jacket and bayard, only then realizing that he had company, showing beginning of springing back to alertness for an instant before realizing who it was and somewhat relaxing, but mostly appearing bluntly stumped as if unsure of how to react – when it came to actually talking to others like a person, the red Paladin could be just as slow on the uptake as he swift to pick up on cues in battle, and their occasionally rocky interactions in the past did not make things easier.

 _Aaaawkward._

Most times, Lance would have been quick to lighten the silence with some sort of wisecracking or perhaps some quip about Keith's training performance, but today, it was the Red Paladin who got around to speaking first.

Though he was more than perceptive enough to pick up on it despite its subtlety, it took Lance a while to interpret his reaction, mostly because it wasn't among the ones he'd expected; Only with some delay did he register that Keith seemed mildly embarassed, though he couldn't think of a reason why that would be, and Keith himself seemed determined not to let it show or back away through any sort of gesture that might have revealed the answer.

Instead, he tried to act natural, or as close to that as he really got:

"Uh... were you waiting to use the room?"

Oh right. Lance didn't actually have anything resembling a reasonable explanation for what he was doing here.

Fortunately enough, Lance was so use to acting that it came to him almost like a natural reflex without much energy needing to be expended.

It was saying something when he couldn't muster enough care to start much of a fight.

"Nah, not really. I just heard the commotion and decided I should have a look inside. I was expecting Shiro, really. "

"I see." he replied, simply, more to fill his space in the conversation than anything else. If he had a particular opinion about Lance's being here, it was not particularly apparent; He'd probably already spent any extra energy that could have otherwise found its way into some snappy comeback.

Lance made an attempt, though, in part because remaining deflated out of jealous awe and general misery would have felt far too much like conceding defeat.

"Testing out your new shiny plaything, eh?"

Even so, it wasn't even so teasing a question, and to Lance's surprise, the answer he received to it turned out more severe than heated:

"It's a ceremonial blade. I'll be expected to know how to use it. "

He didn't say 'ceremonial blade' the way that, say, Coran or Allura would have spoken of a ceremonial _anything_ related to the costums of ther lost home, his neutral if not pensive explication contained neither mocking irreverence nor solemn weight of personal significance, more as if he were repeating, and perhaps contemplating what someone else had told him.

Keith seemed to know that it was a 'ceremonial blade' which he didn't use to know before, but at the same time, he seemed to lack an understanding of the meanings and implacations of what a 'ceremonial blade' truly signified; Even so, the second half of the sentence had come with a discernible tinge of firmness and wanting that still was very much like him after all: He wasn't merely 'expected' to master the weapon by some external influence, but rather, it was an expectation that he had set for himself; Whatever else he might not know, the drive towards mastery was something Keith understood down to the bone, and as such, it represented a recognizable point of reference, somewhere tangible he could start from.

There'd been a quiet intensity to his words, a cut up packaged version of the fury he'd witnessed earlier fueled by a focused intention.

"You're really serious about working with their little resistance club, aren't you? I thought this was just to win their trust and recruit them to our cause... but I suppose it can't hurt to try and impress them, if they're going to be our allies."

Keith didn't really answer, perhaps, because he didn't truly have an answer to give, but he didn't get snappy, either, instead, he seemed content to let Lance ramble on as he picked up his jacket and bayard with a thoughtful expression and eventually joined the blue paladin at the entrance, apparently intent to go about his way – which, in turn, reminded Lance that it was probably his turn to get out of his way and let this awkward encounter get to a fittingly awkward end without ever making it to a clear resolution.

"You know, I actually might. Use the room, that is. " he commented, more to himself than anyone else, as he took a step to the side to let Keith pass to wherever he was going to next, presumably the showers. In a gesture of vague goodwill, he acknowledged Lance with a brief nod before continuing about his way. "See you later then."

And then, the door slid shut, leaving the Blue Paladin alone with the white emptiness of the room, looking like a dot in an expanse of white in his casual clothes, appearing as out of context as he felt.

Now this was just great, good old Keith making himself even more indispensable and special even as Lance himself still felt stuck. After all they'd been through together and what he'd seen of his genuine value, there wasn't much real animosity that could be mustered up toward his comrade, but at the time time, Lance felt the tiredness and frustration that had been plaguing him this whole day all the more keenly.

With a sign, he turned toward the matter at hand; The least he could do was to work hard so he wouldn't be left in the dust altogether. Might as well work on those sniping skills, that was at least _something_ that he had to himself.

"Computer, start target practice."

As he blasted away at mechanical targets with increasing success, he worked himself from a sense of miserable resignation to an affectation of an angry, defiant confidence.

Why should Keith get to do all the cool things, anyways?


	3. Thousand Fahrenheit Hot Metal Lights

III: The Thousand Fahrenheit Hot Metal Lights Behind Your Eyes

(You see, when Lance first arrived at the Galaxy Garrison, he had at least some diffuse idea of what kind of space explorer he was going to be. Inspired by the example of the famed Takashi Shirogane (then still the Garrison's poster child), he pictured himself as a cool, swaggering ace pilot.

Everyone loved fighter pilots and thought they were the coolest people ever, and as the space program's latest successes were celebrated in the media, there were probably very few little boys (or girls) who didn't look up to those legendary pioneers of humanity, and that included Lance – Heck, he may have been just slightly guilty of posing in front of the occasional posters featuring a younger Shiro and others of similar but not quite equal fame.

His older siblings, of course, encouraged him in his endeavor, the way you tell an enthusiastic little boy that he could one day be president, or how you praise a toddler's haphazard drawings: Mainly from a place of love. They even joked, rather fondly, about how amusing it would be if the baby of their family would go on do do the greatest deeds.

Thus prepared for the world, little Lance set out to take the entrance exams, already excited for the thrill of the victory.

Of course, he knew that only a fraction of applicants would actually manage to get into Galaxy Garrison, and that even among those who got accepted, only a select few candidates would be chosen for the fighter pilot program, and that it was those lucky few who'd have the best shot at actually encountering such renowned luminaries as the ever-beloved ace pilots of legend, but at the time, he had little doubt that he would make it, not when his entire family believed in him so much.

And here's the thing: He wasn't a bad pilot. He probably outshone most applicants from his hometown by a significant margin. He did petty well in his combat training, too, certainly better than Hunk and Pidge did on _their_ entrance exams, and _they_ got in, granted, not as pilot candidates, but: It was a widely known fact that the Galaxy Garrison didn't take just _anyone_.

In short, he was a big fish in a small pond, and his illusions that it had ever been otherwise didn't survive first contact with Academy-level simulations. He was merely one of the many cocky would-be pilots to get their ego truncated upon flunking their first few attempts at a braggadocious debut – his case could even be considered fairly mild compared to what befell some of the more studious, perfectionist types;

Many students , prospective pilots or otherwise, would have been considered the best of the best were they came from and were now for the first time realizing that there were others who could act, learn and compete with them on their own level, and even beyond that.

Just about everyone in that class experienced a broadening of their horizons and a new-found awareness of the kinds of people that existed in this world.

Before he actually encounteredthem , he might have balked at the suggestion that a person his age or even younger could have the strength and creative insight of Hunk or the technical and analytical skill of Pidge, but at the Galaxy Garrison, such prodigious displays were commonplace – and, indeed, barely as much as enough.

The training was tough, but even that could have been braved with some good faith and enough of a 'fake it until you make it' attitude; It may have been sobering and impressive to witness an engineer like Hunk or a hacker like Pidge, but in the end, it could only mattered so much, because Lance hadn't aimed for a spot as a hacker or engineer; He'd dreamed of being a prodigious _ace pilot_.

But there was just one tiny problem with that:

It just so happened that there was an _actual_ ace pilot in his class.

Because here's the thing about pretense: It can certainly bridge awkward gaps and make some people feel better, but it always pales away in the face of that which is called 'the real thing'.

Just by being available for comparison the truth eventually exposes all forgeries, like the light disperses the darkness just by existing; And few lights in that measly interplanetary boyscout bootcamp burned quite as brightly as _he_ did.

Lance, too, understood it the moment he laid eyes on him - he immediately caught his attention, for how could he not?

An aloof, standoffish boy standing by himself in a corner of the room, keeping to himself yet clad in attention-grabbing, bright-red clothing like he was some sort of 1980's anime protagonist; The out-of-place mullet he insisted on certainly did little to redeem his fashion sense in Lance's eyes.

Slight, pale, deep-voiced and dark-haired, with intense dark irises that harbored within them just the slightest tint of purple, like the touch of something otherworldy.

He even had a ridiculous alliterative name, like he was some kind of superhero or something – It's not every day that one meets someone like Keith Kogane.

He was like one of those rare phenomena that happen sometimes, rarely, maybe, when the moon is right; There was no such thing as an explanation for Keith Kogane – indeed, in some respects, even Keith Kogane had no explanation for Keith Kogane. No one quite knew where he'd come from, or how he came to be; He just was.

There was no explanation for the things he did, either. He just did, and no one knew how.

He did not conform to reason and he did not listen to it, either.

There was just something about him that set him apart from everyone around, and everyone could see it; Every last snotty military brat and wannabe pipedreamer, and even the instructors, who often found the unruly boy troublesome to deal with.

If he walked into a room, he'd inevitably be the strongest fighter in it, apart from the instructors and whatever experienced space veterans may be present; If he was present with a task, he invariably proved better-harder-faster-stronger at it than most of his fellow students, especially if it had anything to do with flying.

Put him behind the wheel of anything, and he'd command it as if it were part of his body, and he born only to merge with it, and he'd just write it off to having plenty of experience with the hover-bike that was among his few prized possessions.

It was hard to pin down just what it was about him, or perhaps it would have been easier to state what it wasn't -

Sure, he was blissfully average at subjects that required precise technical knowledge or quick strategizing and generally had little tolerance or patience for things that didn't go his way, but by the point anyone got around to mentioning that, no one would be listening anymore – several ambitious old men among the instructors seized onto him immediately, calling him things like a diamond in the rough or a talent found only once in a generation, and some event went as far as to wonder if he could become the next Takashi Shirogane, but when it came to molding the teen into a disciplined soldier, they might have bitten off more than they could chew:

There had to be a catch _somewhere_ , and thus it would turn out that the supposed prodigy did not exactly follow orders, at least not without liberal interpretations thereof.

Keith Kogane did precisely _what he wanted, when_ he wanted it, as if guided by some inborn killer instinct or some sort of very subtle, subliminal sixth sense – Or well, that was one way to put it. In Lance's opinion it would have been quite sufficient to describe him as a plain old hothead, but most brazenly, his insane stunts worked out at least partially three times out of four.

There were times when they didn't though, and no one in their right mind would want to be responsible for any of _those_ debacles, especially when they'd told him to do something else, or when the success of others was on the line –

Not much of a natural team player, that one. In a pinch, he could make calls, take over yelling orders or be sent to handle something, but he was prone to deciding otherwise and rushing off on his own and did not mix much with the other students after hours.

No one really knew where he went during semester breaks or holidays either – there were never any relatives coming to pick him up, just reports of his riding off into the desert on his hoverbike, and that one persistent rumor that one unspecified seasoned space explorer had taken him under his wing at the behest of the instructors, perhaps in an attempt to rein him in and get him to see reason.

Either way, he was truly something else - If most candidates at the Garrison reminded their fellows of the kinds of people that existed in this world, then Keith would have been the one who went _beyond_ this world – at the very least, he was considered that which is called a "Natural".

And for Lance, whose world had only recently been quite small, he was a very inconvenient existence indeed;

In a way, he was exactly the person that Lance had always wanted to be – skilled, cool, badass, talented, confident and possessed of a certain special X-factor, like someone who was uniquely marked by and for destiny.

You couldn't look at him and imagine that he could be anywhere else but here, doing anything else but this – From his movements, to his senses, to the light in his eyes and even his very existence, up to his stupid mullet and bright red shirt, everything about him was impossible to ignore, so, inevitably, Lance ended up committing every detail of his to memory.

And it irked Lance to no end. But whatever else Keith Kogane might be, it was abundantly clear that he was widely believed to be the best person in their class. So Lance thought what any reasonable human being in his situation would have thought: 'I've got to beat this sucker if I want to win!'

Before long, Lance was measuring his successes not in terms of grades or points, but in how close they had come to matching up to Keith's, and let there be no mistake, on this quest, he went through his own odysseys and quests full of ups and downs, uphill struggles and mastered challenges, and chasing his rival was as good of a motivation as any you could think of, but it was only ever a chase.

If he got close enough to nearly match up to him, if he got to call his one-sided a 'neck to neck race', that was already grounds for celebration, and for a while, that was enough for him, nothing more than chasing after that same ideal he'd always chased simply embodied in a physically example.

Keith was not just an 'example' though, and this was never more clear than it was when certain deadlines approached, and only so many of them could get selected as fighter pilots.

Until then, Lance had always acted as if he were fully expecting to be chosen, you know, when he finally beat Keith at something, hiding from the reality of the approaching decision behind a veneer of humor and diehard cockyness, but ultimately, when the time came, only one of them would find their name on the corresponding list, and between the two of them, it seemed fairly obvious just whose name that would be...

That is, until it didn't.

Lance had halfway resigned himself to cargo duty, even thought of ways to make the best of it (though he never quite brought himself to agree with Hunk's assesment that it was better to get a safer job anyways) when he heard that the supposed paragon had been expelled.

Lance never exactly knew what it happened, but it was more or less sufficiently implied by all he'd heard, especially in hindsight and in particular, because it had taken place less than a month after everyone involved in the Kerberos mission went missing.

At the time, the word was that Keith had over strained the patience of his benefactors once and for all, there was talk about some dramatic fallout in which things had been smashed. He did believe that endearing phrases such as 'lazy waste of talent' , 'nothing but trouble' and 'what in the world is wrong with you?' had been thrown around, and they had demanded that he explain himself, but that was the one thing that Keith Kogane could never do.

But what surprised Lance the most, what fit the least with the definite idea that he had of this person he had chosen as his rival, was that he hadn't even attempted to contest his expulsion – according to the reports that were most commonly agreed upon in the student body, he had simply turned around, gathered his few belongings, climbed on his hover bike and driven out once more into the desert,this time never to return.

The first few days after the incident were rather surreal, and not just because the former golden boy had been turned into a ghastly cautionary tale over night;

It was also the way in which he disappeared so completely that one might think he had never existed, as if he'd only ever been a thin mirage; The boy who seemed so unforgettable had been forgotten as quickly as a bad dream fading away.

So much for destiny –

In the blink of an eye, Mullet boy had gone from one of the garrison's most promising students to a disgraced dropout as to whose uncertain future one could only speculate; Turns out the idea of him was too good to be true after all.

There was very little talk of him, after he left, and what little there was consisted of teacher ranting about how talent alone was not enough, and a couple of studious military brats finally admitting that they'd found him somewhat unreadable and off-putting to begin with – Apparently, becoming old news was another thing he was fast at.

No one even seemed to be missing him very much. No one had known him well enough to know where he had gone or what had become of him, no one stayed in touch; Moreover, there was no sight or mention of his anywhere, none of his bright red jacket and ridiculous hairstyle catching Lance's eyes in the corridor; it was as if the center of the universe had snapped back to where it should have been all along, as suddenly as a rubber band being released.

Just as he'd shown out of of nowhere, he'd quickly disappeared from when he came, as if he'd never been here in the first place.

Upon hearing the news, even Lance himself struggled to recall the last time he'd seen him – for all he'd privately nursed his complex over his former classmate, always comparing their performances and test scores and looking for ways to measure his skills against Keith's, they had never actually interacted face to face all that much – Lance figured that someone who was ostensibly so defined by his unusual prowess would care and notice if someone made an effort to get close to his level, but no one really knew what went on underneath that mullet of his; During his entire stay at the garrison, his opaque, closed-off expressions proved impenetrable to both staff and students with perhaps one exception that was no longer around.

Lance thought he might have encountered him in a hallways a few days before the incident, leaning against a wall near a window wit his crossed arms drawn close against his chest, perhaps looking a bit more sullen than usual, but that could have been hindsight bias;

At the time, Lance had reasoned that he must have considered himself too good to acknowledge Lance's presence, but later on, he found himself wondering whether he hadn't completely misjudged his rival's side of the equation, wondering if perhaps, he had failed to react much to his presence been lost in thought.

Then again, Keith was the sort of person who'd be wholly capable of blowing a big life commitment on a split-second whim, without any need for any previous preoccupations weighing on his mind.

Even so, even then Lance had briefly asked himself how things would have gone if he'd actually spoken to Keith that day.

But he did not hold onto that thought for long, for he was busy with pursuits and exploits of his own. At this point he'd already befriended Hunk and it was soon after that that he would encounter Pidge, though she took a while longer to warm up to him.

Furthermore, one consequence of Keith's disappearance was that there was now a vacant spot at the very top of the fighter pilot program. So candidate number two filled in for him to be in turn replaced by candidate number three and so on, until the last spot on the list had been freed up and filled in with Lance's name.

 _Of course_ he was elated, it was, after all, one of those dreams he'd harbored ever since he was a little boy – But while he outwardly emphasized his rejoicement at both getting into the fighter program and never having to see Keith's face again, there was a certain sinking feeling hanging out behind his shoulder blades that he couldn't quite shake off -

Lance had wanted this more than anything, but why did it have to be _like this?_

If he simply hadn't made the cut, he could have applied again next year, or simply refocused his efforts on being the fleet's best cargo pilot and forgotten all about Keith. Of course he would have much preferred to best him, but if he were to win, he'd wanted it to be fair and square.

Part of him could rationalize that it _was_ , after all, it was Keith's own darn fault for flunking out – but nonetheless, Lance felt cheated, deprived of a chance to to truly prove that he _deserved_ to be a fighter pilot rather than just defaulting to the position because Keith screwed up.

When he disappeared, he left Lance only with an anticlimactic lack of a true, no holds barred comparison of their skills, and the sneaking suspicion that the winner would not have been himself.

The instructors weren't letting him live it down, either: Whenever he did the slightest thing wrong, he'd be reminded again and again that he was only here because 'the best pilot in his class flunked out', or at least that's what it felt like; Perhaps, he wound up the recipient of some frustrations that had never been meant for him, if he weren't what their disciplinarians had to content themselves with now that the true cause was forever beyond their reach.

And perhaps that was why Lance found it hard to forget his rival as much as he might have wanted him out of his sight before; The lack of a clear conclusion between them made the thought of him feel like unfinished business, and so the image of him remained pristine, deeply engraved in his memories, silly mullet and all.

It would be the better part of a year before anyone would hear from Keith again (or from Shiro, for that matter) but when they _did_ meet again, Lance recognized him in an instant.

)


	4. Simmer and Suffer

IV. Simmer and Suffer

"Okay team. Since we get faced with that situation on many of our mission, we will be practicing fighting against multiple opponents today."

Well, that sounded... promising. Like the other Paladins, Lance was forming a small crowd around Shiro, who was, as usual, explaining his intentions for today's official training session in a firm but engaging voice. Princess Allura was also present, standing to Shiro's right in her bodysuit – she had her hair done up and was wearing her bodysuit, which suggested that she was to take part in today's existence and may even have had a hand in helping their leader in cooking up whatever this exercise would hold in stock for them, which given her previous track record of 'creative bonding experiences', did not sound too encouraging.

The Paladins themselves were all in armor and, all things considered, fairly used to the drill at this point, though it was still somewhat apparent that aside from the Black Paladin, most of them were not natural early risers; Allura took pride in always being ready for action as a matter of expected discipline, but enjoyed sleeping in as an indulgence when given the option, whereas Shiro was a genuine morning person who could actually bring genuine energy to these early drills, subdued as it may be beneath his typically serious, put-together demeanor - at least, if he'd been fortunate enough to have a good night.

Given the harrowing things he had lived through, it was not particularly surprising that he occasionally suffered from disturbed sleep, but even on those days, Shiro would do his best to portray an inspiring front to his teammates. The teammates in question had learned to notice his off days nary a week after they'd collectively found themselves stranded in space, but adopted a policy of politely refusing to notice while taking care to be extra nice to him anyways – Today, however, his mild enthusiasm seemed genuine enough.

Lucky him – Lance himself hadn't really slept all that well last night even with his usual regimen of facemask, eye coverings and ambient music; He suspected that he must have just marginally overstretched something in his right shoulder in yesterday's target practice session - Coran had judged that it didn't merit the use of the healing pods and given him some odd-smelling, presumably Altean variety of ointment and to his credit it was all back to normal this morning, but the whole predicament had made it difficult to settle into a comfortable position that evening.

Keith, for his part, seemed... well, not exactly as fresh as the proverbial rose, but focused enough; He was lucky enough to be the type that slept easier after wearing himself out through physical exertion in addition to all the other rather unfair things that made him a born fighter – Another detail that Lance couldn't help but take note of was that he'd come in alongside Hunk, appearing subdued, yet earnestly engaged in the Yellow Paladin's casual chatter, though his own contributions to the stream of conversation remained sparse by comparison.

Of course it was hardly unusual for Hunk to be getting along with people; Though he wasn't quite as in your face forward as Lance himself, he relished opportunities to make new friends and have a good time together and had perhaps been the quickest of them to declare his fellow paladins his 'brothers' after their early bonding exercisers – but he was also cautious and selective with his trust, the sort to reserve special places for special people; and it had been Lance's impression that while he and Keith had a good enough surface level friendship in the sense that they worked together, and might laugh at each other's mischief if the stars were right, but they never seemed to be particularly close.

To begin with, Keith was never the most sociable person in the universe and seemed more than content enough to keep to himself, and while Hunk might be willing to overlook some reservations for the sake of getting along and having a good time, there had been a few moments from which one could have inferred that he had an at least somewhat ambiguous opinion about the Red Paladin and viewed him as someone who could be cold and off-putting at times, which was not how Lance would have described him, despite his own misgivings – perhaps there had simply been some implicit misunderstandings due to their contrasting personalities.

All that, however, seemed to have changed after their recent resource gathering expedition, a development about which Lance didn't quite have a solid opinion yet – For the purposes of forming Voltron and just generally getting along while they were all stuck in space, it was generally advantageous for them all to get along, but there was some little voice in the back of his mind which dreaded the scenario that Keith might end up being more popular with their comrades as well on top of everything else, unlikely as it seemed when considered in a sober, realistic light – Even now their communications still held an awkward quality to them, but Lance didn't quite manage to make out what exactly they had been discussing before their conversation has ceased in order to listen to Shiro, who, incidentally, was now continuing his explanation of today's training program:

"For that we'll be splitting up in groups of three."

Ah. Lance began to see why Allura was joining them today.

"And then it's like a battle royale? Or do we take turns where each of us has to fight off the other two?"

"We can try both."

Lance smirked: "Fine! I call the same group as Keith, it's been far too long since I've seen him get busted!"

Though visibly annoyed at this familiar turn of events, the Red Paladin could not help adding fuel to the fire: "What makes you so sure that _you_ won't be the one who gets busted?!"

At this point they were already provocatively angling their bodies toward each other and the rest of the rest of the team found themselves sighing inwardly at the prospect of what was inevitably about to go down.

Mercifully, Shiro did what he did best and interceded, splitting the space between the two young men with a sweeping motion of his mechanical arm to indicate that they were not to step any closer.

" _Focus now."_ he asserted firmly, ending the situation but refraining from singling out either of the boys for scathing reprimands. Still, after this occurrence it was evident that they would _not_ be paced in the same group; The third person in such a lineup would probably have found themselves rather bored and none of them would have learned anything new.

Fortunately, both boys respected their leader enough to stand down and accept his pronouncements without question rather than talk back and cause him further embarrassment.

"Lance, you will work with Pidge and Hunk for now. Keith, Allura, with me."

"What?!"

There was a bit of an implication in that choice, and Lance did not like it.

He'd certainly noticed how, as of late, Shiro would often take Keith aside for particular comments or even extra lessons – at first, it hadn't surprised him; Lance may not be the world's most perceptive person but he'd long since caught onto the particularly close relation that the two seemed to have, even dating back to before their days as paladins and at the time he had simply been somewhat irked that Keith got to be so close with someone whom Lance considered a personal hero of his on top of everything else that was unfair in the world.

At times, he'd even convinced himself that Keith was simply being reprimanded for his gung-ho attitude, or at least, that Shiro was forced to keep a closer eye on him as the resident troublemaker, but sometimes, he caught himself doubting that, and rather facing the possibility that even _Shiro_ saw greater talent and potential in the supposed 'ace pilot', and when he thought of that, he couldn't stand it.

That, perhaps, was why he thoughtlessly blurted out his question instead of taking note of the initial reaction that was taking place off to the side, not in Shiro's frowning face, but in the subdued apprehension that tensed the Princess' arms and shoulders and the Red Paladin's worried glance that nonetheless avoided focusing too distinctly on her general direction – That one moment of distraction would be enough to completely miss her reaction, as she soon composed herself, forcing herself back into the confines of serious, regal persona;

She stepped to the side, repositioning herself to more directly address Lance and the other paladins, placing her hands together both for effect and ultimately, to gather her own resolve:

"Paladins, _please_. It's just a training exercise." she spoke firmly, adopting a formal but still benevolent style, though her latent frustrations had bled through into the first two words. "Remember that we are doing all of this in order to bring down Zarkon. Right now, we need to focus and utilize all of the time and resources at our disposal to archive that end."

No one could have doubted the princess' dedication, not with the high price she had paid and the burden she herself felt to carry on in her late father's footsteps; The weight of what she had said pretty much shut down any further discussions of a frivolous matter, indeed, Lance was left wondering if she had something in particular weighing on her mind that she would be moved to such a solemn appeal to the severity of the situation rather than simply insist that discipline be followed in a more straightforwardly domineering manner;

Perhaps, she had been thinking about how the final battle might soon be upon them, or still nursing second thoughts about their alliance with the Blade of Marmora – Lance for his part thought that they'd proved their trustworthiness more than enough and had not given the matter much further thought beyond that; If anything, he was excited that they'd be getting new allies with some really wild technology and intel at their disposal – but while it might not be warranted, it was understandeable.

Zarkon may have been reigning for over 10000 years, but from her perspective, both his betrayal to the order and the razing of her homeworld still felt fresh, and then, she'd woken up to find much of the universe plundered and despoiled; The more they'd learned about her past history with the Emperor, the more it was apparent that she was having a hard time trusting others of his kind not only because he and his loyal subjects were her now enemy, but because they had once been _allies_ whom she'd once trusted as much as the current Paladins.

These days, a lot of her inspiring speeches weren't just meant for the onlookers, but to reinforce her own commitment to portray strength and do what needed to be done though she may have found some of the means distasteful – a determination one had to respect even if they were themselves one of those 'distasteful means'.

"Allura is right. Let's just get started." Keith stated, drawing his weapon as he turned away from Lance and the others to follow Shiro and the Princess to the room's northern half once they saw it fit to depart.

The sudden shift in mood and the dangers mentioned in the following left their impression on the faces and moods of the remaining three paladins, though Hunk ultimately took it upon himself to dispel the awkward silence that resulted from the exchange, not just out of goodwill but because he found it sorely uncomfortable himself; Even so, it proved once again how he, like the others, contributed to the team's cohesion and effectiveness even in the simplest of ways: "So, uh, wanna get started with the training?"

Despite Lance's initial preference for a chance to duel Keith, being assigned to Hunk and Pidge was not, per se, a bad thing, and their personalities and mutual friendship made for a fairly fun exercise with some pleasant casual banter, concerning that this was technically supposed to be a drill. Anything's better with friends, as the old adage goes, although the varying experiences provided by their differing fighting styles were probably right in the spirit of the exercise – Out of the three of them, Lance probably had the best technique, but Hunk exceeded them all in raw strength and Pidge was a resourceful improviser.

Truth be told, Lance couldn't deny that his chance to outrun the both of them trying to pin him down was his favorite part of the exercise and he thinks he got quite a few cool moves in before they got him, though he wishes that it had lasted longer.

He's less sure what to do as part of a tag team and mostly defaults to supporting the strategy of whoever he's working together with at the moment and eventually, the whole exercise concludes when Hunk catches Pidge, lifting her up from behind while pinning her hands against her body.

It soon becomes apparent that her attempts at wriggling herself to freedom are ineffective.

"Gotcha!"

"That's unfair!"

"That's making use of a tactical advantage." Lance counters, but by that time Hunk is already setting her down. "I'm sorry, but that's just how the exercise goes."

"It's fine." she shoots back, still distinctly pouty but willing to overlook it as her mind raced to the next potential concern. "So, what do we do next? Going for another round?"

"Nah." Lance disagreed. "Let's just wait for Shiro and the others. We've done everything we were supposed to, so we might as well take a break. Besides, for all we know, they might be just about finished any moment now. "

They might be, but they surely weren't _yet:_ The other half of the room still filled with the metallic sounds of clashing weapons and invariably drew the glances of the other three paladins once they'd all caught their breaths and assumed more casual, half-resting positions.

Shiro, as always, was awesome to behold, but that was given; However, most of the Palladins had not yet encountered Princess Allura in personal combat – sure, she'd implied many times that she had been trained from a young age and Lance certainly remembered how quickly she'd overpowered him right after stumbling from her cryopod, but actively witnessing her was a little something else – She didn't have Shiro's experience with actual chaotic life-or-death combat, at least not to the same extent, but she had the natural grace of someone who'd learned this alongside other common life skills such as brushing your teeth and whatever the Altean equivalent of riding a bike is and moved in fluid motions that might as well be part of her flesh and blood – and she was _strong_ , too, despite the elegant appearance of her stances – Shiro resorted to blocking her strikes with his mechanical limb, and didn't even seem to think of doing it otherwise-

But whereas this might well have been little more than a brisk session of exercise to the two of them, it represented a notably more significant exertion for the third individual in their half of the room;

Keith was visibly exerting himself more than what a simple routine morning drill would have merited, but he seemed determined to keep up with everything he got, if necessary, by sheer force of will – Lance wasn't surprised and neither was anyone else.

One of the most basic things to know about Keith, one of the very first observations you'd better make if you were stuck with him for a comrade, was that there could be very little talk of stopping him once he'd smelled an opportunity; He would sense it in his guts, feel it in his bones, and chase it like a bloodhound, relentless, ferocious and at times, a tiny bit frightening in his pursuit, in the sense that even his teammates were sometimes induced to wonder to what he extent the existence of themselves and the wider world would still register in his mind.

It did, of course, occur to Lance that the Red Paladin might or might not have been born with sharper senses than a 'full-blooded' human male, especially with the far more extreme example of Allura right here before his eyes, but at this point each and every one of them had brought down enough random Galra guards to know that it couldn't make _too_ much of a difference: Keith was exceptional no matter _what_ standard one measured him by;

The list of living creatures with the gall to challenge Emperor Zarkon to a personal duel and escape to tell the tale was probably rather short, and for good reason – Even with the Red Lion, Keith had been outmatched in power and experience, but of course, he had known that, and not cared one bit, a testament of valor that had even managed to impress the ancient monster himself; Even so, he would must likely have been toast if Shiro hadn't regained control of the Black Lion when he did, because the powers they were facing were just _that_ ridiculous.

Lance may have been the sort who liked to goof around and slack off from time to time, since that was simply what he needed in order to keep himself sane, but that didn't mean that he didn't have moments where he thought about just how daunting a task they had all taken up – He wasn't sure in how far Keith understood with the stunts he kept pulling. He'd _say_ he cared about prioritizing the mission, but that might just be his excuse; In the end Lance and the other could only assume, because the Red Paladin wasn't really the most transparent person in the universe;

Whatever was going through his head at any given moment was anyone's guess, now as much as ever. He'd have accused him of taking this training session too seriously, but Lance knew that _he_ wouldn't have passed up a chance to impress Shiro in particular if he'd been given it – Even so, Keith seemed pretty into it for something that was supposed to have been a friendly spar, and as it went on, the entire thing started giving him a weird vibe – Allura _was_ holding back, but barely, as if grudgingly, half-tempted to went some unspoken frustration usually concealed behind her aristocratic demeanor which at this point had been softened up by her concentration.

Lance would have dismissed it if he'd been the only one showing concern, but as he was trying himself to dismiss the thought, he heard Hunk speaking up behind him, a subdued unease audible in his voice: "How much longer do you think they'll be keeping this up?"

"Until someone gets caught, I suppose..."

"Can any of you tell whose turn it is?" Pidge interjected, narrowing her eyes.

Lance could only speculate: "Maybe they went for the 'battle royal' after all..."

Meanwhile, the spectacle continued as a diffuse sort of charge seemed to be accumulating in the room as the sounds of clattering metal and grunts of exertion intensified; Finally, the tension seemed to come to a head as Allura was trading some light blows with Shiro and Keith, who'd evaded their strikes just prior decided to seize the opportunity to attack her from behind while she was otherwise indisposed – his plan didn't quite work out as she noticed him, perhaps catching a glance of him at the corner of her eyes or picking up the sounds of his steps with her sensitive Altean ears, but that in itself would not have been out of the ordinary, were it not for the way she had spun around, suddenly dead-serious and razor-sharp, but still distinctly choosing a motion that was _defensive_ and laced with repulsion, knocking him away from her by shoving horizontally with her staff, and pointing it his way to maintain the distance.

"Do not sneak up on me from behind, you _quiznaking_ -!" She stopped herself there, realizing what she was doing, all too mindful of the slightest tremble in the hands holding her weapon.

It had been a sudden, thoughtless kneejerk reaction, not the product of conscious choice.

That's when Shiro interceded: "Okay, enough of this."

He deliberately chose his words and intonation to simply end the situation without drawing any more attention to it, cutting it off any further discussion but also refraining from direct reprimands in front of everybody else. There might be a need to discuss things in private later, but for the moment, he did not wish either of the two any further – he'd hoped that putting them in the same group for this exercise might help to disperse the somewhat tense atmosphere between Keith and the princess as of late, but by the looks of it, that had been a miscalculation;

Having two team members awkwardly avoiding each other was not exactly good for the team's cohesion, but Shiro wasn't sure if the issue could be sped up; Allura had probably been refusing to acknowledge Keith's existence because if she did, she might react to it –

And at the moment, she couldn't have said how she should, or would, or wanted to react to his presence, except, not like this, not without deliberation or control.

At the same time, Shiro knew Keith well enough to understand that this must be a vulnerable and uncertain time for him, a time of processing and coming terms that might well impact how he was going to view himself in the future; The last thing he needed right now was further doubts and confusions, let alone this constant unpleasant reminder of what he'd learned.

Though he'd decided that it was his role as a Paladin of Voltron that mattered to him in the end, he must be uncertain – perhaps, he'd spent the last days mentally going over every event in his life and reevaluating it in the light of this new information.

It did not matter or change that much, in terms of what his day-to-day life was going to be; He was, after all, still the exact same person that he was yesterday, it's only that he'd found out about something that had been true all along whether he knew about it or not. It didn't change who he was, it merely put it into a new context;

Rather, it was his foundational _idea_ of who he was must be shaken to the core or, at least, called into question, like all of it was a flimsy thing that could just disappear, and, if anything, it was this understanding of himself and how it informed his actions that had the potential to change him, his _reaction_ of what he'd learned – To Keith himself, it might as well seem like the world was collapsing, but Shiro could recognize it as but a difficult transitional period from which he might well emerge from a more solid understanding, but for that, he'd need reassurance and constancy in what, to him, must feel very inconstant.

If he could, Shiro would prescribe him a dosage of normalcy, but that was pretty hard to come by when they were caught up in the middle of an intergalactic war that beginning to really heat up; He did his best to offer the young Paladin his support, but he could not control everything, especially not others in their fold who might be dealing with their own experiences and just ad delicate internal journeys.

Right now, Keith was uncertain of who he was, so they needed the others to mirror that back to him, to show, in essence, that he was still just Keith to them; As such, Allura's pronounced change in her attitude towards him came at the worst possible time, but Shiro didn't thin she'd be receptive to being directly confronted on it, not when she was still processing everything and herself a volatile mixture of unsettled feelings.

To some extent, it was out of his hands; The best he could do right now was to disperse the tension on a situational basis lest it come to a boil before either of them were ready for a confrontation.

"I'd say that was enough practice for a day. You all did great."

Hunk was socially perceptive enough to recognize Shiro's intentions and go along with them; Pidge, however, wasn't. "You're letting us out early? But I thought we were supposed to be preparing for the final showdown with Zarkon..."

It was a perfectly innocent question formulated with the best of intentions. It was, however, also the point at which everything spiraled out of control.

"Pidge is right!" Allura added, sharply, intent on convincing herself that nothing was wrong by refocusing her rage at the one unambiguous threat they could all agree on."I don't mean to make light of your efforts, but our enemies possess overwhelming power. We can hardly be ready enough."

"I agree with Allura." Keith concurred, his voice firm with barely constrained intensity, even as the Princess still stubbornly ignored his involvement, refusing to look in his direction or otherwise accept support from him. "I can still fight."

At this point, Lance's interjection was unavoidable: "So can I!"

Sensing the tension building as the entire situation approached the state of a pot about to boil over, Hunk made one last, futile effort to keep the peace: "...Perhaps we should mix up the groups differently this time? You know, or variety?"

That, simply put, did not turn out the way he wanted it to.

It dawned on him immediately as he saw Lance right past him, smirking like his time had come.

"Exactly! Let's switch it up again! I'm still waiting for my chance to beat up Mulletboy here!"

"Lance, " Keith began with half a sigh, then still focused but speaking with a certain resignation in his demeanor – but the princess' earlier reaction must have left him simmering under the surface, because all pretense of control he had mustered vanished with the Blue Paladin's next challenge:

"Let me and Hunk take him, we're **not** scared of him!" Lance declared, the smirk on his face playful yet competitive. "Unless Mr. Dropout McTackyclothes thinks he's too good to for us ordinary mortals!"

Even then, Lance didn't have any malicious intentions; Perhaps, in his own way, he even meant to deflect from the earlier awkward situation with Allura by focusing all attention upon himself.

But something about his taunt, perhaps just the way he had worded it, struck a tender spot with the red Paladin; Whatever volatile, mercurial mixture of forces had been simmering away beneath his unreadable surface came to a boil, and he lost all his senses.

Keith pounced upon him with lightning speed like a cheetah ready to rend and slash its prey, but even then, Lance wasn't daunted.

For one thing, it would never have occurred to him to see his fellow paladin as a terrifying preternatural prodigy or a ferocious half-alien berserker; He was just a dorky, hot-headed classmate and it was about time someone put him back in his place lest he start believing his own hype – if anything, Lance was _ecstatic_ , because Keith was being _serious_ here, because he was _going all-out_ , because he would _finally_ get his chance to measure their skills in a direct , unambiguous contest, the very same one he'd been denied when his rival had flunked out of the garrison.

Finally, _finally_ , he'd get his chance to prove that he deserved to be here as much as Keith did, or lose fair and square.

Even when the first blow hit him harder than expected and quicker than he could prepare for, Lance did not falter; Even when he barely managed to parry with the muzzle of his rifle, even as he felt the force of Keith's strike in his bones, Lance persisted.

– it only meant that this was for real, that this would _count_ – immediately, Lance's his mind started strategizing and calculating, looking for opportunities and openings. He knew he'd have better chances at longer ranges, but as it stood, he couldn't _outrun_ Keith, and making this into a battle of speed was the surest way to lose; unlike him, he knew to pick his battles; That was _one_ advantage at least, and he wasn't going to squander it.

Rather than let go and evade after parrying, Lance pushed forward, with both hands supporting the length of his weapon, and as expected, Keith pushed back.

 _Gotcha._

Lance _knew_ Keith, and that was advantage number two.

If there was one thing the Red Paladin wasn't so prodigious at, it was knowing when to call it quits. His policy could very much be summed up as 'If you've got a tiger by the tail, never let go'.

And that was fine by Lance, because if he wanted to have any chance at winning this, he needed Keith _locked down and in place,_ so he wouldn't have to contend with that insane agility of his.

Lance was a quick thinker, and there's step number three –

Most likely, Keith wasn't thinking at all – or well, that wasn't entirely fair; Keith could react fast and grasp opportunities without having to pause and think, and that was one of his strengths, but Lance was no deer in the headlights, either, and he could keep his objectives in sight even in the heat of battle;

He _came alive_ here in this moment, teeth bared, blood pumping;

Both of them did, as if this was all that ever mattered and the rest of the word had just about disintegrated around them, and the force of their wills collided where their weapons met. Instinctively, Keith leaned forward with his full weight, go big or go home as usual, but it took Lance little more than an instant to adjust and push against him.

Keith might be able to outmatch him at a lot of things, but in terms of raw strength, they were even, and even though they both leaned in with full force, they couldn't move the other for more than an inch, and none of them could keep the upper hand for long – finally, a fair fight.

Lance's smirk grew sharper as he gave it his all, adjusting the stance of his legs to maintain firm footing, knowing that that might just make that small, crucial difference against a marginally shorter and lighter opponent.

For once, he was in his element, and within his chest, he began to feel the first sparks of a genuine confidence, one that was solid rather than hollow, a brief, split-second realization that he might actually win this.

Then, he senses movement at the edge of his vision – The red beast had smelled an opportunity and quickly made a gamble, taking one hand of the hilt of his blade to reach for a second weapon.

The easy mistake to make would be to keep pressing forward and see this as a chance to overpower him; Keith wouldn't have done this if he didn't fully believe that he could grab his knife in time, and bring it to his opponent's neck within a blink of his eyes.

So, he did something else;

His intention had been to dive down and kick his opponent's legs out from under him, with the side affect of removing himself from where Keith thought he would be, while Lance succeeded in avoiding his opponent's strike and knocking him off balance, Keith was not the sort to obediently stumble to the side: Whether he could have regained his balance or not, he decided to launch his weight forward in a fraction of a second before Lance could regain a secure footing after his earlier kick – he was determined to end this right now, within the next few seconds, be it with one of their weapons held to the other's necks or both of them wrestling each other on the ground.

Even as he felt himself sinking backwards and realized that he couldn't keep his balance, he never let go of his weapon.

He lost a few precious split-second fractions in processing what happened, instants in which the flow momentum turned against him, but even so, he held out his weapon to block Keith's final strike, poised to throw him to the side and disarm him if not whirl down on top of him, turning the tides once and for all –

But whether he actually could have done so was something he would never fight out.

It was Shiro's hand that blocked the motion of his weapon, the natural one, for the metallic one had been needed to block the descent of Keith's weapon.

As he'd chosen to carry out this strike over steadying his body, this meant that he swiftly found himself on the ground next to Lance, landing unpleasantly on his back but attempting to roll himself into an upright position right away.

The seriousness of what had just transpired didn't dawn on on Lance until he heard the severity in Shiro's voice.

"What in the universe are you two _doing?"_

Lance might have expected him to be irritated or disappointed, but he sounded not just angry but truly shocked, though he was making some attempt to conceal that in favor of presenting as the grim authority figure that would be necessary to properly scold them.

The realization sunk in when Lance caught a glimpse of the uncomfortable if not visible concerned expressions everyone else was wearing. Hunk's in particular was almost a bit heartbreaking, Pidge seemed somewhat shaken, and Allura...

Allura was standing there, frozen, with her weapon held in both hands as if ready to strike, her face distantly haunted – Shiro must have kept her back from doing something rash of her own, and only _then_ intervened in the strife between the two Paladins.

Belatedly, it dawned on Lance just _what_ memories the whole thing must have sparked in her, and though it wasn't fair to think that Keith could ever be capable of that kind of betrayal, the faintest illusion of resemblance must have been enough to put a sizeable crack in her steely composure.

Up until he saw her, Lance had half a mind to answer something about 'a friendly spar' or 'preparing for Zarkon', but all snappy comebacks died on his lips when he realized that everyone else must have read the situation, how their friends' hearts must have twisted at the thought of seeing them fight in earnest... which, in a way, _had_ been what Lance hoped they were doing, but not _like that_.

He'd only wanted to compare their skills; Never in a thousand years would it have occurred to him to actually fire a lasergun at one of his comrades or even considered the possibility that it could be any different from Keith's end.

Keith, for his part, was looking...surprisingly horrified, actually, at least by Keith standards. He was wearing a blunt, dumbstruck look of dull surprise, numbly stunned more than outright emoting in any other direction, but it was telling enough - He'd acted without the ghost of a thought and kept going from one reaction to the next in the heat of the moment, and was only now realizing the situation that this particular chain of reactions had led him to, and as he did, the blood was rapidly draining from his face, especially once he beheld Allura's face;

He found himself suddenly caged in this present, the recent past a fait accompli he could no longer undo.

There was no getting out of this one; Like the other Paladins, Lance admired Shiro way too much to brush off displeasing him, heck, even the ever-rebellious Keith would usually defer to him with nary a question; Whatever lecture the two of them had in wait, there was no getting around the fact that it was going to _sting_.

And so, the scolding began, and Shiro seemed cross enough to make a point of rising to his full height first: " _Lance!_ What do you think you will prove or accomplish with this? We have to be a _team_ if we want to defeat Zarkon... The last thing we can afford is to get into petty fights among ourselves. "

Though usually serious and in-control, Lance had seldom heard Shiro sounding this severe, though he knew that it was anger born from worry and painful awareness of what terrible fate they might incur if such a fight broke out during a mission.

In truth, Lance could hardly fault him; If anything he felt awful for scaring him like that.

Perhaps satisfied with his remorseful look, their leader then turned toward the Red Paladin:

"And Keith... I expected better of you. You are better than this and you know it. Remember what we spoke about earlier..."

Lance had no idea what it was they had spoken about, but something about that mention seemed to be a sore spot in his own right – At the very least, it was something that Keith had not wanted to hear about, something that represented a kind of a last straw.

The red Paladins form quaked with barely restrained intensity. He jumped to his feet and hastily moved several feet back, as if he needed the space to breathe.

He made a motion of placing both weapons back on his utility belt, all without looking Shiro in the eye, but he knew that he could not avoid that fate forever, so he didn't try to.

But no one expected the sparkle of tears at the edges of his livid mulberry eyes when he finally met theirs.

"I'm _trying_ , Shiro. I really am! I never _wanted_ any of this, okay!

See this? This is exactly why I can't do what you're asking! I just _can't_ , okay?

I don't know what makes you think otherwise, but _everyone_ can see I'm not cut out for this, even if I tried as hard as I can. This is just like when I flunked out from the garrison... You thought I could do it, but as soon as you weren't there, I just-

I never _chose_ to be this way! Even _I_ don't know why I am like this..."

Lance wasn't fully sure what Mullet boy was talking about, but he was pretty sure he heard his voice cracking in places; This was raw, even for him.

He was usually more closed off than this.

He took two more steps back before deciding to storm out of the room altogether before Shiro (let alone Lance) could say anything; One barely had to imagine the thunder sound effects.

On the way out, he motioned to slam the door only to let out an angry grunt when he realized that this wasn't exactly an option with the futuristic Altean sliding doors, but he disappeared through it all the same, leaving behind an awkward silence only broken by the distant, rapidly decreasing echoes of his furious steps as he ran down the corridor.

Clearly, there could be no more thoughts of training, then.

Shiro exhaled a deep, long sigh. Perhaps he could have handled this one a little better, or perhaps this was bound to happen sooner or later; Either way, it was done now.

"Everyone, don't hold it against him. He's got a lot on his mind. Just give him his space for now, I'll go check up on him in a while... "


	5. To Disarm The Stars Within Us

V. To Disarm the Stars Within Us

"Say, Lance..." Hunk began, when Lance thought the topic was long since taken care of, just as they had finished putting all the equipment away and changing out of their Paladin armors.

"Why do you always have to pick fights with Keith?"

Great. Was even Hunk on his side now? Lance already _knew_ the fight had been a mistake; As if being scolded by Shiro hadn't been enough. He was sufficiently embarrassed as is, the last thing he needed right now was for someone else to rub it in his face.

But the Yellow Paladin sounded so genuinely concerned that Lance couldn't find it in him to snap at him, so his reply remained at a level of constrained annoyance, even as he made full use of all available excuses to avoid meeting his eyes, such as being engaged in the process of putting away his armor.

"Why am I the one 'picking fights' here? He's the one who went after me this time. It's not my fault that he's a hothead."

"But if you know it's gonna be like this, then why do you keep provoking him?"

"I'm not 'provoking him' or anything, _he's_ the one who keeps flying off the handle. Why are you even defending him of all sudden?"

Lance closed the hatch of his armor cabinet with a little more force than he'd meant to.

Hunk paused at that, thoughtfully closing his own armor cabinet with significantly less force.

"You know, I guess it's that I normally have a pretty good feeling for what people are like, but everyone gets things wrong _sometimes_.

I thought I knew what Keith was like, but then we went to this gross Weblum mission together, and it's got me thinking that I might have gotten it all wrong.

I don't know if it's because he's part alien, or just because we don't have much in common, but I think I misjudged him. And so, I was thinking that maybe you've got it wrong, too."

"What's _that_ supposed to mean?"

With any other person, Lance could have easily worked himself into a defensive huff or accused them of unfairness, but Hunk seemed pretty sincere about this; Besides, he was not the sort to be taken in by flashy displays, so if _he_ thought they were missing something here, it might be for a good reason; Lance might not _like_ what he had to say, but as one of his longest-serving friends, Lance owed it to him to hear him out.

"I guess I used to think that he wasn't the best sort of person..." he admitted, almost a tad sheepishly as if he were confessing to something shameful. "I mean we were supposed to be a team and being friends with someone means accepting them even with their weaknesses, but he'd always stand off to the sides rather than sitting with the rest of us, and he'd do things like snap at Pidge when she was just missing her family or say that we shouldn't rescue Allura, so I kind of got the impression that he didn't care very much about us or the team.

But then we went on that mission together, and he really didn't seem all that bad, you know?"

"So you're telling me he's 'just misunderstood' or what, after you've seen how great he is at kicking giant space worm butt?" Lance retorted incredulously, as if half-seriously mocking such a cliched notion.

"Well, he wasn't really like how you always describe him, like all haughty & that. I suppose that could have been one reason for why he kept to himself, but, there are other possible reasons. He almost reminded me a bit of Shiro back there, with how he made sure we both kept it together. He wasn't out to steal the show, either, I feel like he really appreciated the parts that I did.

But most of all... I think he was really concerned that we might hate him, or, treat him different..."

"Well, then maybe he shouldn't be so much of a stuck-up jerk!"

"No Lance. I meant, he was afraid we might hate him because of the whole part-galra thing."

That seemed not to have occurred to Lance, and even after Hunk spelled it out with a grave, serious voice it took him a while to grasp just in what way it was meant.

For all it could make him overly trusting sometimes, the Blue Paladin had a fundamentally open, well-wishing disposition that Hunk really appreciated.

"But... he's not with the empire, is he? If I got that right, he didn't even _know_ until he met those Blade of Marmora guys, and they're on our side.

I mean, so yeah, he's got a huge magical destiny complete with one of those mysterious plot trinkets, but what else is new? It's not that much of a big deal, he's still just a hotheaded desert hermit with a really bad mullet. "

"That's how you see it, but you have to admit, it is a tad freaky that he's a real proper space alien. At least on his mother's side."

"So are Allura and Coran, and we've been hanging around them for months now."

"Yeah that is right, but you probably noticed that Allura has been sort of avoiding him as of late..."

"Hm... now that you say it things did seem kind of tense today. I figured he might have done something to upset her after their space getaway recently..."

"She probably just needs some processing time after what happened with Zarkon. I mean, think about it. She wakes up and learns that 10000 years have passed and half the universe has been enslaved, also, everyone she ever knew except Coran is dead. I couldn't even be imagine what that must be like, and still she immediately started working on fighting back immediately.

In all this time, she never really had an outlet for how hurt and angry she must be over all that..."

Lance, as ever so often, did not disappoint the faith Hunk had in him: "That's still no reason why _Keith_ has to be that outlet, though." he concluded immediately. " I mean, he does have a very punchable face, but all that stuff the Empire did isn't his fault. Shouldn't Allura know that?"

"She probably does, but that doesn't mean she doesn't have many difficult feelings to deal with...

In the end she's just keeping her distance until she has things sorted out, it's not like she's going out of her way to be a jerk to him."

"Still sucks for Keith though. Is _that_ why he blew up like that today?"

"I don't think that's all of it." Hunk concluded. "Like I said, he seemed pretty worried that we might not trust him anymore. I used to think he didn't care that much about us, but he wouldn't be this upset about all this if he truly didn't care – what if he actually _does_ want to be friends with us, but just isn't very good at it?"

"Well, he did spend the last year as a desert hermit." Lance surmised, jokingly entertaining but not fully buying the thought.

"I really mean it, though." Hunk continued. "I suppose he's just very different from us, but... I mean, Pidge seemed pretty standoffish too when we first met her, and now we're best friends and everything. After what happened, I do think he's trying, in his own way. Even with you."

"Me?"That, Lance found rather difficult to believe. "I mean, you're a pretty great dude so I wouldn't be too surprised if he secretly had a soft spot for your or something, but what in the universe would make you think that he wants anything to do with _me_? He probably thinks he's _better_ than me or something. Remember that time he compared my brain to a paper airplane?"

"Can you blame him though? You're the one who was always on his case, and you know how he is. You'd be annoyed, too if someone was always trying to show you up.

Besides, that was when we first started up, when he didn't really know you. You know, he really wasn't lying when he said that you had a bonding moment that time Sendak took over the castle. Plus, between all of us you've got the most in common with him. You both like piloting things, and dangerous fighty stuff, and besides, you're like the main person he ever makes jokes with. "

"Seriously? What's _that_ supposed to mean?" Lance huffed, sounding almost a little offended.

"It's supposed to mean that maybe you could actually meet him halfway instead of always riling him up. "

(

Elsewhere in the castle, Shiro's steps had come to a halt near wide flight of stairs, still keeping their distance, still reluctant to move around the corner, past the bannister or up the stairs where slouched figure sat halfway up the wide, elegant stairs that told of a lost civilization''s long-gone splendor and the afterglow of days past.

Still in Paladin Armor, yet half-leaning against one of the ornate bannisters, his eyes seemed transfixed on some of its intricate engravings that still told of those long-buried times, his face washed clean of emotion apart from a faint weariness to his eyes.

"I know you're there." he stated, trailing off into the air. "I can _tell_."

" _Keith,_ you know that-"

"It's fine. I've got it under wraps now. I get it. I shouldn't have ...just _reacted_ like that. Can we please not make more of a fuss about this?"

"Alright. I'll let you be. But there is just one thing that I _need_ you to know-"

"I know what you're gonna say, that's the point. It's not that I don't know better. It's just... I'm just so tired of being like this. It's like no matter what I do, I'm never able to _change."_

"You _know_ that's not true-"

)

It was that precise moment then, which, in either corner of the castle, was interrupted by Allura's voice echoing over the speakers, summoning them all to the bridge.


	6. Decretum

VI: Decretum

When Lance and Keith first heard Allura's voice urging them to the bridge, each of them in different company and in a different part of the castle, they did not expect that it would end with both of them in their Hangars, preparing for a joint mission -

Heck, with their earlier spat, both expected that Shiro would be keeping an especially close eye on them especially where serious action could not be avoided.

But life, for the Paladins, did not always go as expected, not with an actual war on and what not, and yet, out of all potential turns this day could have taken, this one would at least have been one of the more far-out ones, which again, might have made it matter of tempting fate.

Either way, the most Lance could say to explain it was that drastic situations sometimes required drastic measures. And how had the need for those measures come about?

Well, one thing kind of led to another.

In particular, the following things:

 **(a)**

When they first made their way to the bridge, it was implicitly understood that they were all to function despite their earlier tense encounters, and the good news was that they all understood that, especially Allura.

She kept her minimally courteous but defensively steely demeanor intact even when the universe's choice of poor timing couldn't have been more trying for her; For a lifetime, she'd been trained to keep up her royal veneer up come hell or high water, and it continued to serve her even after all else had deserted her, like a hollow exoskeleton wrapped around whatever softer parts of her being still existed – nonetheless, Shiro was glad to arrive when he did took the correspondence with Kolivan out of her hands as soon as he could do so without being too blatant about it.

"We apologize for contacting you on such short notice, but be believe that there might be an opportunity within a very limited time window."

As Shiro continued to conduct the conversation and Allura sort of stood in the background behind him looking vaguely frosty, the remaining paladins had gathered one by one in the back of the bridge and were discussing what they'd pieced together from the exchange.

 **(b)**

As often, Lance was the first to volunteer a conclusion. "So, there's a suspicious undersea research base, or mining operation, and their operative got taken out?"

"It was _supposed_ to be a mining operation, " Pidge corrected "But they _think_ it's a research base. It's definitely suspicious though. Something about developing new super-weapons. "

Hunk seemed somewhat unsettled by the thought: "More Super than those robot beasts or that planet-eating quintessence canon thingy?"

"We won't find out unless we see for ourselves." Keith concluded. "They don't think they can afford to send another operative or an entire spaceship without further compromising their position, but it's a different matter if _we_ go; They'd just assume that the previous operative tipped us off. "

"So we're going to sneak into this underwater base?"

"Well..." Pidge found herself glancing over to their leaders as Shiro and the princess were still debating the specifics with the Blade's representatives. "From what I can tell they'd prefer if we attacked, seized the whole base and destroyed it, and possibly worked with them to extract intel from its remains. Shiro seems to think that's possible, but he'd rather we attacked more covertly to minimize the risks. Allura doesn't seem to impressed with either option, I think she'd prefer if we infiltrated, blew the place to smithereens up and ran for it, but Kolivan and the others don't think they could get us inside so we'd have to do it ourselves..."

"It's up to Shiro and Allura then..." Lance concluded.

It was then, after the more relevant topics had been concluded, that Keith turned to adress the Blue Paladin: "...And, hey Lance?"

"Eh?"

"Before we go out there and possibly wan, I just wanted to say..."

He almost choked on the words but to his credit, he did spit them out:

" _Imsorryaboutbefore_."

That was new. To his left, Lance caught a glance of Hunk brandising a grin that exactly 50% encouragement and another 50% I-told-you-so.

"I shouldn't have – I didn't mean to-"

"It's alright." Lance replied, playing it cool. "It was actually pretty fun since you weren't underestimating me for once."

Almost instantaneously, Pidge and Hunk exchanged a glance, unquestioningly questioning their teammates rather questionable definition of 'fun'.

But Lance's answer seemed to do the trick, in that Keith's expression softened up into something resembling a weak smile.

Lance couldn't say he was displeased with that result. As annoying as he sometimes found Keith to be, he didn't deserve to feel awful about this, especially not in the way that Hunk thought he might be, nobody did.

 **(c)**

Meanwhile, Allura and Shiro had said their farewells to Kolivan and, after a brief and serious discussion amongst themselves, turned to address the other Paladins.

Before they even arrived where the others were standing, Lance took the opportunity to pose a question of his own: "So, what's the word, boss man, are we going in?"

"If we are, we have to act quickly." Shiro explained. "From what we know, there will be a squadron of warships passing by that base within the current spicolian movement; They'll probably receive reinforcements and then, we might not get another chance to strike..."

"So have you decided on our strategy?" Pidge in inquired.

"Yeah, good question. " Hunk agreed. "I would really like to have a plan before rushing into a place with superweapons in it."

"Well, our problem is that the base we're supposed to be looking into is located deep beneath the planet's oceans, all the way at its bottom." Allura explained, her reined-in suspicious about the whole undertaking still somewhat audible. "We can't get to or away from it without specialized equipment or a lot of prep time. If we launch a full-scale attack with the castle, that would give them plenty of time to summon the fleet. We can hardly vaporize the Oceans to get at them, and even if we could it would again take up valuable times."

"And if we infiltrate by ourselves?" Keith proposed.

Shiro shook his head. "That's no good either. They're already on alert from the previous infiltration by the Blade of Marmora, and even if we _could_ slip past their defenses, whoever went down there would be trapped at the bottom of that ocean with little means of extraction. Even if we managed to grab the intel and destroy the base, it's uncertain of we could get out. We can't afford to lose anyone, not this close to our final chance to take our Zarkon."

Despite the odds he just described, Shiro didn't really sound like he was discounting the operation, but merely describing mission parameters.

"So what do we do then?"

"We think our safest bet would be a third option here. We fly in with the lions and try for a stealthy descent, preferably far away from where the Galra are stationed, then, we dive into the planet's oceans and approach the base underwater. That way, we can always escape to our Lions if things go south. "

Immediately, the Paladin's minds started working and processing what they knew of the task at hand – In Lance's case, that meant that he struck a pose and immediately began indulging in delusions of his future grandeur: "Yay, an underwater mission! This looks like a job for _Aquaman_ , baby!"

Hunk's concerns were of a more realistic nature: "Did the blade of Marmora send you anything about the planet's orbital defenses?"

"Or some scans of the atmosphere? Maybe we can use them to calculate our path of descent so that we minimize our chances of being detected."

"Good point!" Hunk agreed. "We should probably ask Coran for help, too! ...where _is_ Coran?"

That would turn out to be the complicated part. Coran had actually been one of the first people to arrive on the bridge in response to Allura's summons, but sometime during the whole discussion, he'd noticed an odd reading on the long-range sensors that might just merit further checking out, and excused himself to do just that.

Now, just as the Paladins had started wondering where he'd gotten to, he arrived with some news that were game-changing enough to call into question the eager mission-preparation that had previously begun.

 **(d)**

"A Distress call?"

"I'm afraid so, Princess. It's a weak, non-standard signal so the main computers didn't immediately register it as such, but, I believe it can be traced back to that planet we visited a couple of quintents ago. What was it, Zappax?"

"But they've barely had interstellar flight for a few dozen decapheebs. We barely had any because they were still hunter-gatherers ten thousand years ago. What could the Galra Empire _possibly_ want from them?"

"Natural resources, perhaps, or a base in a strategic location for further expansion into the sector. The border of the Empire had been advancing in their direction for years, and the third planet in their system does have valuable ore deposits of rare minerals. If I remember correctly, we wanted to stop by for restocking before we realized that the system was inhabited and were hailed by one of their patrol ships..."

Even after all she'd seen in the movements and pheebs after her rough awakening from cryosleep, Allura's brow still quivered with shock and disbelief , and her clenched firsts shook with barely constrained outrage that she was trying her hardest to refocus into action.

"Those vile creatures!" she spat with an edge of disgust in her voice. "With their present technology, the Zapaxi can barely keep their ships intact long enough to reach the closest nearby systems, and the number of active faster-than-light ships they have can be counted on one hand. They don't remotely stand a chance!"

She couldn't be the only one who felt a tug at her heartstrings at that thought; That world of fledgling explorers had much reminded the Paladins of their own and perhaps offered a glimpse of what might soon be in store for their home, and seeing them faced with the overwhelming threat of the empire sharply reminded them of the real threat that this same fate might one day befall their distant home – Even so, most of them could not help but flinch a little a the livid Princess' audible wrath.

Catching herself after her initial outburst, Allura shook her head, adding something in a quieter, more somber voice. "Sometimes I wonder why I'm even still surprised. I've seen the level of destruction they've been wrecking all around the universe. They destroyed my world, and still, I can't believe how any sentient creature could _do_ something like this..."

Shiro regarded the Princess somberly – for all her occasional aggression, vindictiveness and carefully maintained veneer of royal fortitude, somewhere deep down she was still a compassionate girl who believed in altruism, as much as she had been left reeling by an unimaginable betrayal.

In a way, he could emphasize with her, at least in a manner of principle, even if he could not imagine the magnitude of what she had experienced – Once upon a time, she must have been a lot like he was, certainly put-together and capable of defending herself, but just as much a believer in peace and a world that was orderly and just, where there was a clear right and wrong and forces that ensured the triumph of the former over the later... but that was before they had known a chaos that, no, never actually shattered their belief in justice and the essence of them as people, but surely left its share of cracks and dents in it.

Even so, they both had to keep themselves going, because the universe needed them to, and Shiro knew it; There was no time to stand around being stunned when they needed to take action:

"We need to do something about this, and we need to do it _fast_ , before the Galra fleet gets to Zappax."

"But Shiro... what about that underwater base? Someone _died_ to get that information, and if they really _are_ working on a new superweapon-"

That had been a honest question, posed with earnest eyes upon realizing the conundrum without pushing for any particular decision, implying only a hope that Shiro's wisdom might perhaps resolve this double bind they found themselves in, but that's not necessarily what it sounded like to Allura, especially since it had come from Keith.

"Surely, you'll understand that _protecting innocent lives_ is more important than pursuing some far-fetched hint from _dubious sources._ The code of the paladins obliges us to help those in need, even when it's inconvenient or even costly to ourselves!"

These cutting, impersonal words were the first she'd spoken in Keith's direction for days, and yet they weren't – she sounded like you might imagine her sounding at a state address in some darkest hour, or as she would issue a declaration of war, unyielding and iron-cast, with no room left for anything to leak or peek behind her metaphorical armor.

"Allura's right, " Shiro concluded, bringing the situation back under control but striking a more neutral tone: "I regret having to say this, but, if we want to make it to Zappax in time, we might not have the time to infiltrate that base and make it out in time."

Seeing that even their leader had no alternative to present, the red paladin narrowed his eyes and face into a deep, dark frown, not disapproving, but _analyzing,_ briskly blazing through a slew of racing thoughts, springing into existence and structure before being silenced all at once by the certainty of his inner voice in the split-second he arrived at a decision and resolved to stick with it.

He seemed to assume a broader, more confident position in an instant, cleansed of all uncertainty and hesitation as he faced Shiro's gaze head on.

"The Zappaxi aren't very advanced, right?"

"Well, I guess that means on what you means by 'advanced'." supplied Hunk, who had yet to guess the intention behind that question. "They're more advanced than Earth."

"And you said the Empire was attacking because they were basically the next thing in their path?"

Allura seemed irritated by the bluntness of the question: "That's their MO, yes."

"Then that means they probably don't know we were there, and since they can completely dominate the Zappaxi with just one of their ships, they're probably only sending a small force by their standards."

"Well yes." answered Pidge, running the conclusions over in her head and seeing no reason to contest them though the point he was getting at still eluded her. "Since the Zapaxi ships can't really touch them, they could just show up in orbit and threaten to blast the capital cities with their ion cannon unless they surrender..."

"So, if it's only a small contingent, we might not need Voltron to take them down."

It was then that Shiro realized, all at once, just where this was going, and why he'd better shut this down real fast: "Keith, _no._ I'm not sending you to infiltrate that base on your own, and if he's truly a man of honor, Kolivan wouldn't send you either. This is _suicide_."

"It's also the best shot we have. It's just as the princess said – We have a duty here, both to the Zappaxi, and the universe at large." The Empire keeps razing everything in their path, and they have to be stopped. But they can't be allowed to get their hands on some new super weapon, either. Splitting up is the only way we can take care of both. We _have_ to try it."

Even as he spoke with a worryingly resolute tone and expression, he couldn't quite look the Princess in the eye, nor face her borderline suspicious scrutiny.

From the looks of it, it would be necessary to outright say it now.

"Keith. You're not responsible for any of this, and you don't have to prove anything to us or earn our trust. You already have it because you're part of our team. "

"Maybe not. But you once told me that responsibility isn't something that you deal with once it falls in your lap. You _take_ responsibility because someone has to, and I don't want this on my conscience. I'm going, Shiro. I _have_ to go. "

His mind was made up – this looked increasingly less likely to settle for an easy resolution. Under different circumstances,Shiro might have been proud.

"You _know_ I can't send you out there on your own."

Support came the unlikeliest places when Lance spoke up in an uncharacteristic display of maturity: "Shiro's right, you know? We still need you to form Voltron. If anything happens to you, we can't do that anymore. Have you ever thought about that?"

"What would be the point? It's not like I'll be able to do anything about it from beyond the grave, and besides there's _always_ some sort risk, no matter _what_ we do. None of us have been safe ever since all climbed into the blue Lion. No one is _ever_ safe!"

Things were getting quite impassioned at this point, not so much that one would have feared a repeat of earlier, but enough to faintly bring the memory of the incident to one's mind.

Hunk, in particular, seemed noticeably uncomfortable with the direction this was taking. "Don't say something like that! O-rAt least take somebody with you, if you're going to do something dangerous like this...!"

"Like who?" he simply asked, bluntly.

"Well..."

This was one of those moments where all eyes inevitably turned to Shiro.

"This is one of those situations where we have to make tough calls and where the universe perhaps expects more of us than we can give." He began, his serious prelude implying that he had come to a decision, and that some of them might not like it. But which of them would it be?

" It's one of these moments where we have to be at our best even when it's hard...

 _Lance_. You know I wouldn't ask this of you if there was another way, but the Blue Lion is the most suited to an underwater mission."

"Wait? I thought we'd agree that splitting up was crazy?"

"I know you that you two have your disagreements, but I'm going to need you to listen to Keith as you would to me."

"He starts a fight on the training deck, threatens to rush off on his own again, and now you're putting him in charge?"

Lance expected Keith to snap right back at him in his usual reactive way, but instead, his demeanor remained subdued, perhaps even slightly uncomfortable.

"Lance. If completing the mission somehow meant that we could never go back home, would you do it? If you had to order me to do something that might kill me, could you?"

"Are you saying you _could_?" Lance spat back "Send me to my death without batting an eyelash, if it were me?"

"I'm saying that there's nothing great about being put in charge!" Keith argued rather insistently. "And besides, it's just going to be the two of us. Not much of a chain of command there.

Let's just go and do it. Shiro and the others should be heading to Zappax as soon as possible. "

Shiro, as usual, remained dead serious: "Lance. Can you assure me that you'll do your best to work with Keith? Can I count on you with this?"

"Sure you can! It's not _me_ who's the local hothead!"

 **(e)**

It did not escape Lance's notice that Keith and Shiro left the room together;

The veteran space explorer had placed his arm on the Red Paladin's shoulder as a gesture of comfort, and seemed to be addressing him with some words of advice.

Lance didn't overhear that much of their conversation, but as they were headed for the exits, he couldn't have avoided picking up a snippet as he passed them by, even if he'd wanted to:

"...this could be a good opportunity for you. Just in case."

 **(f)**

"Here, " Pidge explained, handing each of the two would-be infiltrators an engraved crystalline rod that might have been the Altean equivalent of a flash drive.

"We didn't have much time to refine the model, but we ran the basic calculations. If you fly this maneuver, you should be able to make a dive for the planet's Oceans without triggering the orbital defenses."

Hunk, who had followed her to the hall where the would-be infiltration party was just about ready to board their respective lions, was a little more caution in his assessment: "Well, in theory..."

He found these facts necessary to voice, but he didn't like them very much: "The idea was to hide you in the noise generated by the atmospheric interference so that the sensor algorithms would filter you out, but for math reasons, it only works if you follow the trajectory very precisely. It's kind of like a Souflé: If you don't get exactly right, our whole strategy collapses into goop, and you're out in the open. "

"It's because the waveforms have to be precisely opposite to each other in order to cancel each other out." Pidge supplied, not that it really helped much. "If you're visible for a tick or so you will likely still register as a sensor error, but you'll be walking a thin line. Show up too often, and they'll not only notice you, but be able to trace your trajectory."

"Well, good thing then that you've got 'the tailor' on the job!"

Already stressed or irritated by whatever he'd been discussing with Shiro earlier, the Red Paladin couldn't spare much patience for Lance's sparkling megawatt grin.

"Lance, _take this seriously._ One misstep to many, and you'd be vaporized by the orbital Lasers."

Couldn't he even let him have _this one moment_?

" _ **I**_ would be vaporized? Really? If anyone needs to be reminded to take this seriously, it would be you, Mullet! Stick to the plan and no showing off, _capisce_?"

"That's... not actually how you pronounce that word..." Pidge mumbled, resisting the urge to roll her eyes. Her teammates' attitudes weren't doing much to boost their confidence in the whole undertaking.

But where she was deflated, Hunk was concerned: "Look, guys, just be careful, okay?"

It might have been futile to tell them; sometimes, the Yellow Paladin doubted whether his friends were capable of prudence at all. Still, if there was even the tiniest chance that telling them might make a difference, Hunk wouldn't want to not have _told_ them.

"Look, we've got this. Just hurry up and get to Zappax, okay? Right now the Zappaxi need you alot more than we do."

"And good luck to you too!" Lance added, with a wave that was probably meant to diffuse the tension even further. "And don't worry, I'll make sure that he doesn't blow himself up."

(That elicited a displeased expression but the red Paladin's anger had probably burned itself out earlier, at least for the moment.)

"It's not our first mission together, either. We did well enough that one time on the Balmera, didn't we?"

"O-okay. Just stay safe..."

And with that, they parted ways.

 **(g)**

"Do you think they'll be bickering all the way to their destination?" Pidge commented, side-eying Hunk none too optimistically.

"Who knows... I mean, they _have_ been working together a lot better than they used to, even if they _did_ start a brawl this morning... maybe this will even turn out to be a great bonding exercise for them..."


	7. Pineapples in my Head

VII: Pineapples in my Head

The journey to the planet in question was nothing like _either_ of their fellow Paladins had envisioned it – the two of them weren't constantly at each others throats for the whole duration, but they weren't exactly using the time to chill, either –

Just for tactical reasons, it was more or less inevitable that the Paladins kept a communication channel open as the two Lion-Ships trailed through space so they could coordinate in case of 'unexpected company', but aside from its value as a mere precaution, that commlink might have been considered a waste of energy, since all it transmitted were a pair of somewhat glum images of the pilots' faces.

To be honest, Lance would have preferred the bickering so far; Blame his extrovert sensibilities, but there was just something slightly irritating about being with a person (at least in a figurative sense, given the actual acres between their spacecraft as they floated through the void) but not talking to them, it set him just the slightest bit on edge and left him with a nagging sense that something was wrong which he might potentially have to fix – Not that he had much hope of getting any conversation out of Keith.

Even when they were all discussing things together, he had a tendency of standing off to the side or sitting down at a distance; Heck, if his headhole from their visualization training was to be believed, he associated his desert hermit hideaway with peace, quiet and pleasantness, seemingly content to exist by himself like some species of solitary lizard.

If it were Lance, and _he_ had to live like that, with nothing but cactusses or tumbleweeds for company, he'd have gone nuts within days; Without people to draw reactions from, he'd always feel vague and uncertain about himself or his place in relation to them, and, as of recently, also markedly more aware of the interstellar void all around the tiny bubbles of technology that sustained them out here.

Lance was a bold adventurer when he was among friends, but everything's blurry when he's by himself, and as of now, the Red Paladin didn't give him terribly much to play off on – He was just staring ahead, focusing on his controls and the void they traversed, his brow furrowed by whatever brooding thought might be taking place behind them – but despite Pidge's occasional jokes about his being "emo", that was not usual for him.

He was very much in his element when it came to fighting, flying and traversing expanses of quiet; Under other circumstances, this may well have been the sort of situation where he might be seen sporting a thin, subdued smile, but not today.

Lance wondered if he was still fuming from their earlier confrontation – sure, he had apologized, but there was a good chance that Shiro made him do that.

He couldn't really tell - In moments like these, Keith could be about as unreadable as a statue or a brick wall.

For all that Keith was concerned, Lance might as well not be there -

[

-and that thought took him back, to earlier, though not all the way back to the fight, for he hadn't _actually_ been granted the mercy to materialize on the bridge as soon as he'd heard Allura's summons.

Indeed, he had been somewhat miffed when he realized that he'd have to take out his armor almost immediately after he'd put it away and spent far longer than necessary doing it as he'd been engrossed in conversation.

"I don't 'rile him up'!" Lance retorted as he pulled his armor back from the locker. " _He's_ the one who thinks he's better than me, just because he was better at those simulator tests, even though he flunked out."

"I can't believe you're still keeping a grudge about that." Hunk answered, intent on reasoning with him but still with a tinge of disapiontment. "I mean, we're paladins now. We're probably halfway across the universe from the Garrison. Some of our classmates may have graduated by now, besides its not like we can just waltz back in after breaking in to get Shiro. We're lucky if we ever make it back to Earth a all! What does any of that even _matter_ anymore...?"

"I'm not 'keeping a grudge'!" Lance retorted, a bit ore emphatically than he'd intended. "And it's not about the garrison, either. It's just that...-"

At this point, he seemed to struggle with putting his thoughts into words, and there was a moment where the Blue Paladin realized that in order to be honest with himself and his friend, he'd have to look within

"Look, I don't really have anything against Keith. At least not anymore, not since we fought side by side and became part of a team. But he's so much better at everything! He's a better pilot than me, a better fighter and just all around doing cool stuff...

I thought being the 'daring fighter pilot' was my _thing,_ and then he comes in and does it all better than me, just to rub it in! If anything, _he's_ the one who has it out for _me._ "

"He's not good at _everything,_ that's an exaggeration. You're a lot funnier, for one thing."

"...Thanks?"

"And besides, I don't think he means to show off or to act like he's better than any of us or anything... he's not that sort of guy. I mean, just think. Back when we all rescued Shiro, _you_ were the one who went on about how you're rivals or something. He barely seemed to know who you are."

" _That's it_! That's what sucks the most!" This seemed to have broken some sort of dam.

" It's like I don't _exist_ compared to him. At least when we get into fights, I get some sense that he's not so perfect, that I even exist in the same world at him, that he's even-"

Lance stopped his outburst there, when he realized that he was going to say 'human', and how that could be taken the wrong way in the light of recent revelations.

Even so, something essential about his position seemed to have come through.

"You know, that sounds to me like you want him to _acknowledge you_ more than anything else. There's other ways to do that besides picking fights with him, just saying. I mean, he definitely known who you are _now_ that you're both Paladins."

]

The silence between them seemed as everlasting as the void between the worlds.

Then, it was broken with a suddenness that briefly left Lance having to reorient himself when he heard Keith's deep, serious voice breaking into his thoughts. "We're getting close now."

"Just so you know – I know Shiro put you in charge, but if you do something stupid, _don't_ expect me to just follow along with it!"

Keith eyed him with a displeased glance, but didn't seem to be out for a fight on this particular point, and simply resumed leaning forward to pull at the controls to prepare for descent.

"Suit yourself."


	8. Shut Up and Drive

Finally, their destination came into view – a large, dark blue orb silhouetted against the starlight, with a quality like a very dark marble that was translucent only to a point; the light could play beneath its surface and tantalizingly hint at a depth beneath, but not penetrate it any further.

The ocean world floated in the void, its surface forbidding in its featureless uniformity, the dark of it's night side unbroken by artificial lights, a remote, untouched periphery of creation not unlike a grain of sand fallen from the boots of the gods without intention or greater purpose.

For billions of years, its existence had gone unnoticed, nor even deemed worthy of a name – and utilitarian as they were, even the Galra who had now chosen it as a stage for their latest nefarious deeds would only have given it a numerical designation.

Alertness crept its way into their minds as they approached the ultramarine disk, although Lance sublimated it into a kind of excitement or nervous energy right away.

"There it is. Mystery planet with mystery weapon."

"We'll be within their sensor range any moment now." Keith observed, somber yet focused, eyes homing in on the suspended Orb before them.

"Alright, let's do this."

Lance had to mentally thank Hunk and Pidge for their foresight – upon plugging the data rods they'd given them into their consoles, the algorithms they had worked out immediately set to work and the resulting outputs were dynamically integrated into their interface as a swirl of colored, helical streaks which spiraled down into the planet's oceans, subtly shifting with the sweeps of the orbital surveillance devices, weather fluctuations in the atmosphere and the turn of the planet.

"Looks like a complicated maneuver. Will you be able to fly this?"

"Oh come on! All we have to do is stay inside the blue lines, right? Besides, I don't think the Lions would burn up in the atmosphere."

"Maybe not, but you'd be a huge conspicuous fireball if you get the descent angle wrong."

"Since when do _you_ care about stealth anyways?"

Keith let out a pronounces, exasperated sigh. "This isn't about me. I'm responsible for this mission, remember? How am I going to look Shiro in the eye if something happens to you?"

"I can handle myself, just mind you own business. Didn't you say that there's no real chain of command?"

That seemed to shut him up, though it didn't really taste like victory, more like a cheap trick than a true archievement.

"In any case we need to figure out a good entry point to fly down to this planet," Lance continued, moving on to the confusing tangle of projected waves and spirals leading down to the planet. "Maybe we could wait till the next of those big waves get here, this way we would have some time to accelerate before we get to the loopings. Or we could-"

" _Now."_

Keith, as it would turn out, had not listened much to Lance's explications at all, and instead focused his attention on the planet as if waiting for something, or much rather listening for it, sharp senses wide open, absorbing everything, perhaps even analyzing, but doing this by means of iconic, pattern-like half-conscious processes in the moving, sensory part of the psyche that were much older and faster than the clunky loops of abstract, conscious thought.

He took a moment to close his eyes, take a deep breath, and then, he was gone, leaving Lance scrambling in pursuit.

"Hey! Wait! Keith!"

But there was no stopping this now, now when they had to follow the moving trail outlined by the calculations. The slightest deviation from their course would have left them wide open to detection, and as for the Red Paladin, he was completely absorbed in the challenge before him, his thoughts one with his mystical machine, which was, after all, somewhat lighter and faster than Lance's.

Lance would have no luck expecting him to slow down and wait; If one of them was to be detected, it would serve everyone involved better if the other one wasn't, or, at least, that's what his logic might have been, but it was no use talking to him when he was like this.

"So much for responsibility!" Lance exclaimed, more for the take of venting to himself, groaning as he gripped the controls tightly, bracing himself for the sharp curves.

The Blue Paladin did not quite manage the same natural, graceful flow as his rival, but he'd be damned if he let himself be shown up and though he struggled, he ultimately curved through the air with some degree of relish, faster and determined to catch up... until he heard an alarm beeping.

He'd glided just the slightest bit off course, an error he corrected in a manner of seconds, but the question still remained:

"Did they spot us?"

Pidge and Hunk had said that this wouldn't necessarily be the case, but-

"Just keep flying!"

Easy for _him_ to say, since he hadn't been ordered to plunge into a nosedive on such short notice.

By now, they were well into the atmosphere, enough for its friction and resistance to register as a slight increase in temperature on their instruments.

The Surface, once a featureless expanse of blue, was now recognizable as an enormous ocean-ball which nonetheless still appeared curved from their current position, though the section of it that they could see of its disc grew smaller and smaller during their rapid approach.

It was not like the seas of earth, there was a deeper, much purer blue with little in terms of greenish tinges, stretching far and wide with no distinguishable features to divide it, just a desert of blue dunes for miles and miles on end.

It occurred to Lance that out there, it must be scarcely less silent than it was up there in the void, or, if there was much sound from the waves, it must have been rather monotonous, and here they were blazing from the skies, leaving colorful trails behind them, causing what must have been a gigantic ruckus, a position, which, all things considered, was actually rather exposed, were it not for the abundance of space and the size of this planet on which there was just one post with one defensive, orbital platform above them, in itself a space too large to be overlooked if not through the indirect eyes of technology -

But had they been seen?

The answer was not obvious, even on this open field, but what neither of them could possibly miss was the cross-formation of homing missiles coming at them from across the planet, speeding toward them from multiple directions.

The moment their minds registered the blaring of the sensors, the fire trails were already visible to their eyes, and even _they_ could not react fast enough to avert them outright – Or at least, Lance couldn't have. All four were aiming for him, but only two hit their target, releasing their fire against the Blue Lion's armor, one of them melted into sludge by the fire blaster, and another caught by the Red Lion's jawblade, which may have had some chance of disarming the mechanism, but instead just triggered a point- blank explosion.

They were caught, too confined by their maneuver to do much more in terms of evasion, and the spiking temperature readings were one thing, but Lance could actually _feel_ the immense heat from the warheads, which had _not_ been the case in previous space battles;

Anything that could give _them_ trouble with the unusual material of the Lion's armor could probably melt its way clean through conventional spacecraft – what more, the readings should have dropped soon enough as the smoke from the explosion dissipated, and they didn't, at least not as far as they used to – From the looks of it, they may have been blasted by some nasty prototype weapon, and perhaps Pidge or Hunk could have deduced something about its function from this alone, but all Lance knew was that they needed to regain control of their Lions and stop themselves from getting cooked.

In a feat of quick thinking, he activated the Blue Lion's Ice beam, and while it took him some degree of effort and psychic reaching to make her turn so he could freeze their own flanks, he managed. The cold was a sharp, unpleasant sensation coursing through the bond, but almost immediately, the strange readings dropped off and the Lion's controls started responding normally again, which Lance promptly took opportunity of to turn around and shoot some frost beams toward the red Lion for good measuring, taking note of a strange, tar-like black residue clinging to its face, perhaps whatever had been causing this mess to begin with.

"Keith! Are you alright?! Keith!"

They'd lost contact for a bit during the attack, but now, the com channel flickered back to life, showing both Keith and the cockpit that contained him in a rattled, but reasonably intact state, the systems perhaps returning to normal activity after the strange heat surge had been contained.

It was probably a small mercy that the Red Lion was immune to heat in particular because otherwise, its limited armor may not have been enough.

As for its pilot, he was pulling at the controls, trying to stabilize his fall and keep himself and his lion from plummeting toward the waters.

"I've got this," he simply grunted, focused on little more than the task at hand and rather frustrated.

"Wait! Don't do anything!"

"Eh?"

"Let's play dead. Make them think they got us, that might buy us some time. We've crashed before, when the space witch got our wormhole, and we all survived."

To his credit, Keith didn't protest, but quickly grasped Lance's rationale and graced him with a grim nod of acknowledgment before proceeding to brace for impact.

It wasn't long before they thundered into the water, which, at their speed, was barely preferable to solid ground, and they sank down to the depths like rocks, with millions of air bubbles trailing behind them.

Even when these cleared up, the underside of the wide blue waves revealed not a different, colorful world, but even more wide featurelessness, nothing but sterile methylene blue in all directions of the third dimension, and the immense speed at which they had crashed propelled them very far down, an aching, groaning transition from an environment of very low pressure into the crushing depths, but even so, their units held out, their speed slowly diminished, and the icy depths at the very least served to cool their heated armor.

Eventually, things were close enough to a quiet, and though still sinking and reeling from the acceleration forces, however mercifully dampened by their ships' systems, the pilots could loosen their white-knuckled grasp on their control yokes and face up to look at their screens and, indirectly, each other.

"It won't be long before they come looking for us," Keith concluded, his mind already about to leap straight back into action despite the unforeseen ordeal. "We must prepare for a fight."

"Maybe not.

For all we know, they might still be wondering if they just shot at a sensor artifact – after all they caught a spy a while ago. Maybe they were just being extra paranoid. If they don't find us here, they might dismiss the whole thing. And even if they did see us as we fell, there's good chance they think we're dead or stranded – and they might not have a good read on our trajectory since we were flying fancy loops and everything - So we might have some time to get out of here."

"They might tighten their security just in case, though. Especially if they _are_ 'being paranoid.'"

"Nothing we can do about that..." Lance admitted. "We did tip the off to our being here. But they're probably expecting us to attack in our Lions, not infiltrate in person...

We'll have to Ninja this.

Though that leaves the question of how we're going to get close enough to do that. Do you think their scanners will pick us off if we like, park in a distance and walk, or jetpack there?"

"I have no idea." the Red Paladin admitted.

"So much for Shiro's whole plan about being able to evacuate quickly...I wouldn't want to be blasted by their lasers with only our Paladin armor to protect us... "

"Me neither, but we have no choice." Keith surmised, his mind's eyes still unwaveringly fixed on their objective. "We know now that they _do_ have unusual weapons."

The expression in his eyes was resolute, but his voice didn't entirely match up to it.

"We'll have to figure it out when we get there."


	9. Garden Walls

**Garden Walls**

 _(_

 _I breathe for you now_

 _yet you seek_

 _to the dark infested_

 _home_

 _of my kind_

 _Look inside_

 _Past the guarded walls of hope_

 _I breathe_

 _(My time has come now)_

 _)_

Paranoid or not, as it would turn out no one had thought to fit the perimeter of an undersea base with anti-personnel weapons, perhaps because the idea of infiltrating something on an ocean floor by foot was ludicrous – one might as well send infantry floating against a space station -

The deep oceans were an environment every bit as hostile as the vacuum of space, and the pressure seals of their Paladin armor were every bit as necessary to survive out here, and the slightest nick in their armor would have been every bit as lethal -

Even so, the Paladins had chosen to brave this hostile terrain.

Or rather, Keith had chosen it, and Lance was just sort of tagging along to make sure he returned in one piece, so there's that.

To even get within walking distance of the castle, they had to fly their lions halfway across the planet, preferably at a speed that would not cause any highly noticeable thermic disturbances, but at least, they were somewhat less exposed in the water than they were in the open air.

As space travel grade speeds were not an option without drawing attention or risking a collision with undersea mountains, the journey to the bases' supposed coordinates took a while, and they were relying blindly on the instructions that the Blade of Marmora had left for them, as the ocean around them continued to be disconcertingly empty.

Here in his element, Lance could maneuver almost as well as Keith could, and, growing bored along their journey, demonstrated this with a few loopings, which earned him a few reprimanding glances from Keith – But at the same time there was no real comfort to this depths, not the way there had been on the mermaid planet.

These were Oceans, alright, but they were wholly unlike Earth's, eerily silent and devoid of life. One would have thought that the two Paladins would have witnessed a whole world of its own on their trek across the planet, especially as they approached the Ocean's bottom and took care to shadow natural cliffs and undersea mountains when possible, but rather than swarms of undiscovered organisms, they encountered nothing but bare rocks worn smooth by the ages – there was no sand on this sea floor, for that would have been a legacy of burrowing creatures, nor was there even the type of thick bacterial plaque that would have preceded it, a silent world of glass-like, reflective surfaces interrupted, only rarely, by the occasional jagged evidence of volcanic activity, always the same, unexciting shapes, created only by the mechanistic forces of physics.

As far as the eye could see, there was nothing for it to pick up upon, nothing to notice apart from the larger image itself. It seemed little less desolate than the blackness of space, which, at least, was illuminated by stars some of which represented an oasis of being in the vast sea of nothingness, but this literal sea with nothing in it was no different from the dust, gas and the asteroids floating in the void, primordial matter left in the state of its creation.

These feature-starved depths had likely never been illuminated by light before, nor been beheld by any mortal eyes - The young Paladins were the first and they might be the last if the Galra search parties didn't come across these exact patches of landscape, but there wasn't something _too_ see, as if the forces that had molded this blue marble world had never anticipated the possibility much like a lazy video game developer.

There wasn't even enough of an incomplete something to make things appear creepy – they were simply desolate, in the manner of a great wide salt flat or a blank piece of paper.

And it was upon this flat that the two boys eventually unloaded themselves, stepping out of their Lion's secure capsules into a world that was the most casual kind of lethal.

They could not see the base from here, and it was a good thing they couldn't, since they didn't want their opponents to see their Lions, or know where they were; The coordinates they were heading toward were marked down in the interfaces of their helmets because they would have no other means to find them.

Unlikely as it was, it seemed frightening to think that they were technically one equipment malfunction away from wandering around this forsaken nothingness until they suffocated.

"We better download our current position into our helmets to make sure we find our Lions afterwards..." Lance commented when he first surveilled the terrain, a certain unease faintly audible in his voice. "Wouldn't want to get lost out here in a hurry."

"Wait. Don't. What if one of us is captured?" Leave it to Keith to make this place seem even worse. Ever the cynic, he never failed to conjure up the worst of horror scenarios: "If we have anything on us that could give away our position, the Galra could get there before us. The Lions would fall into their hands, and whoever _wasn't_ captured would be lost out here until they suffocate."

"Like I'd even try to get out of here if one of my teammates is captured. That's not what a Paladin would do!"

"What would you prefer then? That we _both_ die? That we deliver the Lions straight to our enemies? Is _that_ what a Paladin would do?"" he replied, somberly. "I don't want this to happen any more than you do and I'll do everything I can to make sure it never comes to this, but if the worst were to happen, at least one of us has to make it back to Shiro and the others."

Lance did not really know what to say to that.

"But how are we going to get back?"

"We'll just have to find the way back through our bonds. Or steal a ship or something."

"How do you know they even _have_ ships to steal? I don't know about you, but I don't think this sounds like a very solid plan."

"We won't know until we get there. There's just no way to plan for what we don't know yet. Any plan we make could turn out to be completely useless. There's simply not getting around this."

"Well, there _might_ have been if you hadn't rushed down here ahead of me!"

"What's the _point_ of placing blame now?" He retorted, somewhat louder than he meant to. "What's done is done!"

He did not immediately realize that he was yelling, but once he caught himself in the act, it was not just his voice, but much of his general demeanor that simmered down considerably.

"Let's just ...go and get it over with, before they have even more time to prepare for us."

Their journey on foot was every bit as silent – and awkward as every other part of their flight had been, but without the characteristic hum of the Blue Lion's mechanisms and with her presence in his mind more distant, Lance was all the more aware of the overwhelming, foreboding silence of this place.

Even what they'd spoken to each other had been transmitted from one of their helmets to another without ever crossing the hostile space in-between.

Keith, of course, seemed hardly fazed by their bleak surroundings and simply walked onward, eyes pointing at their destination like arrowheads in motion; anything else would probably have sullied his desert hermit credentials.

So, for all that Lance found this silence unnerving, the prospect of being the only one attempting to fill the ocean with chatter, to be so transparently affected when his rival wasn't seemed much, much worse.

Stupid Keith with his stupid taciturn ways and his stupid inability to ever walk or sit like he was part of a group, with his stupid case of chronically crossed arms and those stupid steps of his that never synched up with anyone else's.

This was anybody else on the team, Lance could have filled this time with conversation and never even thought about the man ways in which they could die out here, where their best hope was to make it into a scary Galra base where they would face _yet more_ lethal danger.

So, they made their way across the seafloor. While the weight of their suits ensued that they didn't float, it wasn't exactly like walking on land, either.

Sometimes the ground was faintly reflective, and sometimes it wasn't.

Once in a while, there was a crater.

At other times, it seemed like they were the scribbles of a lazy artists, simply dumped in the circle illuminated by their their lights with no further background drawn. But even if they could not see much of it in what sometimes seemed like a tin bubble of existence, a shrunken universe containing only the two of them and the silence, Lance felt the presence of the water with each step, so he knew that the expanse was still there, and with it, the ever-present potential for death by crushing pressure.

Lance expected that the first he would see to suggest that they were finally nearing the base would be diffuse light in the distance, but instead, it was a chance in the landscape, or what little snippets of it they could see, beginnings or ridges in the ground and, before long, what were unmistakably underwater mountains.

The base must be situated near a cliff or mountain, or perhaps on top of one.

A curious choice, when they could have used the relative monotony of the landscape to make it hard to find unless one already knew where to find it. One might think that they had situated it near a landmark so they _themselves_ could find it, but wouldn't their technology do this for them? Or had the Galra architects merely been uncreative, thinking as one might on land where a fortress in the flat desert would be exposed whereas one built in the mountains would be a fortified position? Had they disguised it as part of the undersea mountains, or did they need their proximity for mining purposes?

Lance didn't know if Keith had picked up all of these things or none of them, but it was then, as they were beginning to enter mountainous terrain, when he suddenly stopped his previously single-minded advance with no prior warning.

Finally, an excuse to speak: "What's the matter?"

To Lance's surprise, Keith replied in a quiet, pensive tone that didn't return his own annoyance or hostility, as if his thoughts were thoroughly occupied by something else. "...I don't know, it's just..."

"Just what?"

"Nothing. Let's keep going."

Unfortunately, he was not granted this mercy – instead, he was treated to Lance skipping forward a few steps as best as he could in the thicker water, in order to catch up with him and assault him with a probing glance from that side.

"Is it that Spidey Sense of yours acting up again?" he asked, point-blank. "Because, if it is, I _do_ want to know. This might be important."

Irritated, Keith cursed the capricious fates that had gotten him into this situation - This sort of plump curiosity was preferable to Allura's outright disdain, but these new expectations that he would somehow have all these answers just made him pointedly aware of how few of them he actually had.

But he had more than none, and what cruel mockery that he should be given them now, now that he had committed himself to a greater purpose after all these years of aimless wandering.

Voltron was his _life_ now, it was why he got up every morning and inhaled every breath, and just as what last little doubts he'd had about that finally evaporated, as he was about to part with the last reminders of his nebulous past, to forget their names and their woes, the answers had to drive themselves between himself and his purpose like a wedge, or rather, a piercing, sharp sword, a sword he could never have activated if he were wholly human, and suddenly they were all looking at him like he was a _thing,_ a _stranger,_ an _enemy_ even, in the case of Allura.

For so long, he'd been looking for something to do with himself, some use to which he could put the very few things he could do without being thwarted by the very many that he couldn't, and when he realized the scope of what they were faced with, well, he had very little tying him back to earth, or any other attachments.

The moment he found himself in the Red Lion's cockipt, blazing through the sky, he knew that he had finally, _finally_ found the place where he belonged.

He had this, and nothing else but this, which meant that he had nothing to lose, so, he was ready to risk if it all, _give_ it all if need be -

And what started as an union of purpose was the closest he had ever come to being part of something.

What little other threads remained, well, they had extended past the sky, and he had pursued them as it was, perhaps, only natural, but in the end, he had renounced even them.

And yet, they suddenly these very threads seemed to be all that anyone could see about him anymore, the cords that tied him to the dark locust horde infestation that swarmed across this universe since before humanity discovered the wheel, and he was left only with the tentative hope that they would eventually look past all that, look inside, to find... what?

Because it was very much as he had told Hunk not too long ago: He hadn't changed. He hadn't _turned_ into anything.

No, it was way worse than that: He had _always_ been this and any idea that he had ever been anything else was never more than an illusion, a flimsy one, in hindsight, but still one that pertained to his very life, down to the innermost fabric of it, and it cast every doubt he'd ever had into new relief.

It was one thing to be a hopeless troublemaker with a temper, but quite another to be _this_.

The beast is ugly, and he'd never thought of his human heart as something that could be called into question, something he would have to chose to hold onto again every day of his life, or it might just slip from his desperate white-knuckled hands.

He didn't know what he would do if he didn't have Shiro to guide him – There were many moments in these last few days, brief, overwhelming instants that felt like they lasted forever, where he wanted nothing more than to hold onto him forever and never stray more than a stone's throw from his sight, like a small, frightened child clinging to a parent or older sibling, so terrified to lose his path in a way that would confirm Lance's view of him as a volatile, triggerhappy nutjob, let alone the way that _Allura_ had been looking at him as of late -

For it wasn't just hate, or wrath, or disgust. All of these reactions and feelings were, at their core, mechanisms that were meant to protect the individual from that which might destroy them.

The Princess maintained a face of strength when she was backed into a corner, like an exoskeleton to support her – and it was not in her nature to be close-minded or short-sighted: She was always the one pushing them to rescue and protect all life in its every shape and form – with just one pointed exception.

Her cold facade was a mechanism of defense, a cover for the way she flinched away whenever he passed her way, for the anxious darting of her eyes, the way she could not _suffer_ him to be facing her back for even a moment, and he did not know what, exactly, it would take to shatter her ability to trust and believe to such a degree, but he could read between the lines -

Neither she nor Coran had even ventured to disclose the full story, and that alone spoke of the pain that surrounded this topic like a nest of thorny vines, but they all knew who the Black Lion's original Paladin had been, and, having experienced it themselves, they understood just how close the Paladins of old must have been to even have a chance of forming Voltron.

He wouldn't be surprised if sometime before his betrayal, Zarkon had been nearly as close to King Alfor as Keith himself was to Shiro, at least as far as the late King's side of the equation was concerned.

Allura herself had mentioned not to long ago that she had traveled to the Empire before the war, become familiar with their style of architecture – it seemed quite possible, then, that the two men had been going in and out of each others palaces, showing up to each others birthdays and weddings, dining at the same tables.

Perhaps, the fallen Emperor and the other first-generation Paladins had been a fixture at celebrations and get-togethers as Allura was growing up, talking to her, inquiring about her and congratulating her on life's milestones for far, far longer than Keith had even been alive, let alone existed anywhere near the Princess' vicinity.

And one of them had then hunted the others down one by one, singlehandedly massacred nearly everyone she had ever known, and unleashed a tide of fire and atrocity upon all of creation.

It was not even unlikely that, before that fateful day came, she might have described the fallen Paladin as someone admirable, someone she'd have trusted as much as she had come to trust in Keith in their brief time together, if not more.

So, with all that given, or at least well within the realm of possibility...

How could she know that it wouldn't happen again?

How could _anyone_ know?

Of course, Keith was not one to see things in either white _or_ black and at this point he had encountered some honorable souls among those he still hesitated to think of as his mother's people, but in the end this was not about any of _them_ , but about him.

He couldn't think of anything that could possibly compel him to turn on Shiro, murder his way through his comrades and torch the earth for good measure, but at the moment, there was very little he could say with certainty where his own person was concerned -

And yet here he was, quite material, warm, alive and breathing, being what he had always been and might never understand.

Sometimes he felt like every little thing about his life had come into question, and he could not even say whether it should be or not – It wasn't like he could really compare his experience to a normal human's. How much of what he'd simply taken for granted all his life would have floored or even terrified the people around him if only they could know?

He _did_ have a bit of a strange feeling, but, it was not as if normal humans didn't have 'a strange feeling about this' sometimes. But like _he_ did?

How could he ever know? The old adage of 'whether your blue looks the same as my blue' could be dispelled when one considered the common origin of people as variations of the same ancestral blueprints, their likeness on the chemical level, but this bridge which only sidestepped the fundamental problem of inexorable experience did not apply to Keith, not fully.

One could argue that for his existence to be possible, humans and Galra can't have been too different to begin with, but on the other hand, it stood to reason that he was irreconcilably different from _both_ in the fundamental, intricate ways in which the whole is greater than the sum of its parts.

Keith didn't know how much his chain of thought had been apparent on his face, or if was just the long time he'd taken to reply, but Lance backed off, attempting a conciliatory gesture with his hands. "S'okay. You don't actually need to answer that if you don't want to-"

But by then, Keith was already motioning for him to be silent, closing his eyes and facing upward, as if he were listening for something.

He might have dismissed or perhaps just privately followed this impression if Lance hadn't called attention to it, but now, he felt impelled to 'take a closer look', as it were.

The sensation was diffuse, but there _was_ something there, some strange, altered quality intruding on his consciousness, and what more, he felt a type of intrinsic response in his body rising to meet it, as one would recoil from scalding heat, shake from a horrid stench or perhaps be drawn by a sweet scent and find oneself salivating, an unconscious response to stimulus, yet, at the same time, not one he could really compare to these others.

Trying to let go of thought as he knew it, he tried to focus on the feelings in his body while holding back from trying to sort or label them too early. There was, at the very least, a building of tension in places, not unlike a sort of anticipation, but to do _what?_

It must have been building for some time, to scratch at the edges of his consciousness like that and grate away at them until he was finally forced to acknowledge it beyond the subliminal level, actually quite pervasive once he actually allowed himself to 'tune into' whatever it was.

"You okay man? Don't force yourself- Can you describe it?"

At this point, honest concern for his comrade had drowned out the voices of envy or even idle curiosity.

Keith didn't know what he looked like at the moment, but he realized almost with a shock the thick, honeyed quality of his voice when he made himself speak. "Strange feeling. Sort of distant, or, dreamy, except not. Not like drifting away. "

He moved his hand to his head, intending to run it right through his face, only to remember that he was wearing his helmet, but even so, the resulting contrast and the feel of the glass on his fingertips, even through his suit, was enough to bring him back to reality, or what passed for reality these days, considering he found himself at the bottom of an alien ocean, about to storm an underwater fortress.

Then, he made a decision, closing his eyes again and taking a deep breath.

What he did next must have looked rather strange to Lance, but then again he was the one who asked about this, and besides, Keith needed to _know._ He took a few steps to the front, a few more right back and then about the same distance backward. Then, he repeated the process from left to right, paying attention to the odd sensation and feeling for a gradient in its intensity, before raising an arm and pointing straight ahead:

"It's coming from there." then, realizing what he'd just said, letting his conscious, rational mind get to work on it: "It's getting stronger the closer we get to these mountains."

"Is it like that energy from the lions?" Lance inquired, seeming to take this whole thing rather seriously.

"No, not like that. There's nothing else quite like that that I'm aware of."

Not to long ago, the Blue Paladin would likely have made fun of him for such remarks, but now that he had some explanation to attribute it to, even he seemed to give it all more weight.

"So something different then? Something to do with that mountain, or why they went through the trouble of building a base in a place like this? Is is something like a Ley Line?"

" _I don't know._ " he stated with thee beginnings of a defensive firmness, somewhat overwhelmed by the flurry of speculations. He appreciated that Lance was trying to help and, most of all, make sure that they didn't miss any vital information, but he could not say in good confidence that he had any such thing and besides, he was finding this whole situation somewhat uncomfortable.

"For all I know it's not anything, and I'm just imagining all this.

Or having some freak headache."

Mercifully, and much to his credit,

"Still, I wonder if there's some particular reason that they put their base on this mountain. Maybe Hunk, Pidge or Coran would know."

"Maybe..." Keith replied, suspecting that Lance was looking to start a conversation, but not really in the mood for one nor very sure about how to maintain one even if he wanted it.

"That's why it would be good to have them here, you know? I mean I see why we had to do it this one time, but man, I really don't like this splitting up business."

So, the journey continued, up what soon turned into slopes and later still, winding little paths amid ever steeper mountain formations. The surfaces were increasingly rough but there were still some of those treacherous rounded bits, and while there was little risk of them falling to their deaths with not just their jetpacks but the water surrounding them, simply losing sight of each other could have easily spelled their doom.

At some points, their activity may or may not have been described as a very bouncy sort of climbing, which, after their long trek and longer flight, _was_ getting a bit exhausting.

Even so, and even despite the latent apprehension he felt about this growing, nagging _something_ , it was becoming apparent that Keith was somewhat more accustomed to such hikes across rough terrain, and that just annoyed Lance to no end.

Seeing that this was an ocean planet, _he_ should have been the one with the advantage, but all things considered, the seas of this nameless rock were more like a water desert than a real ocean.

"How much further is it, anyways?" he asked, annoyance shining through.

"Well according to the map and the coordinates we got, we should be there any moment.

At first, there was little else to indicate that they were getting close to _anything_ – if anything the inclines got steeper, and there were a few moments where they had to pull each other up to avoid tumbling down the slopes.

But then, there was a greater abundance of wide, passable paths, and though the mountain itself still extended far and beyond, they seemed to be approaching a kind of plateau near one of its sides, perhaps, indeed, a spot where one could imagine a base.

Then, as the ridges that circumscribed said plateus's outline became fewer and in-between, Keith's suspicious were confirmed:

There was, indeed, something patently strange about this spot.

On their way here, they had crossed miles and miles of this planet's crust, a planet which, thus far, had appeared utterly lifeless, free of any trace of animals, plants, or even microscopic life.

But when the two young paladins ascended to the plateau, their eyes were met with clear evidence of not just life, but _intelligence –_ not just in the right angles, smooth surfaces and sharp-edges of deliberately crafted artifacts, but more recognizably still, _buildings,_ or at least the ruins thereof.

They were faced with broken-in walls and holey rows of columns, and behind them, the remains of a pleasure garden, filled with arches and pavilions; To their left, there was a roundel of stone lowered into the floor, a cut-off, downward-pointing cone with a round bench going almost all the way around it were it not interrupted by a small set of stairs.

Still further back, there were more elaborate buildings of a shimmering, glittering material that wa

sn't quite marble – Before Lance could stop him, Keith had reached out to touch one of the columns and as far as he could discern this through his suit's gloves, the surface reminded him somewhat of polished soapstone – but the most striking part was that even down all the way here in the icy depths where no light shone, there was an almost lifelike warmth to it, not like something heated and cooling out, but something that help and produced a warmth of its own, radiating from its deeper core to its cooler surface.

Standing this close, he could feel that elusive _something_ quite clearly now, something like warm air flow spreading from a flame, and yet _not_ , like two different, semi-transparent pictures overlaid on each other.

"This looks like it's simple stone, but it's not." he concluded. "It's like I'm touching some sort of creature or machine... maybe we should grab some of it."

"On the way out, maybe. Unless you want to carry a piece of this the whole way..." even so, Lance was inwardly amazed at the sight, and also rather perplexed – to him, the most striking part about this complex was the abundance of elegant, open architecture, intended to invite the elements rather than protect from them, and all of this found to the side of an undersea mountain at the bottom on an empty, lifeless ocean, exposed to the cold, the pressure and the darkness of these lightless dephts.

But perhaps the sharpest contrast was apparent when they stepped on the ground near the buildings – rather than being a hard and continuous stone surface, like most of what they'd seen of the ocean floors, they were standing on some layer of grime, something their boots left actual prints in.

"This place looks almost like a sunken island... How did all of this _get_ down here? We've practically flown halfway across this planet's sea floors and so far there's been like, absolutely no sign of life. Sure, we didn't see all of the planet, maybe we just missed it, but there weren't even worms. Or Lichen, or even Plankton mucking up the water."

"The same way we did. From Space. This might well have been a colony of some sort – These aren't just stone ruins, there's some advanced technology at work here."

"Doesn't look like something the Galra would build, though. And part of it is busted. You think place had something they're after?

"That's very possible."

"It _would_ explain why they'd build their base here of all places."

"Then it can't be long until we get there." Keith mused soberly, looking away from the Pillars and further toward the alien edifices as he stepped in between two the columns he has just been scrutinizing, past the garden walls. "Stay alert."

"Yeah yeah," Lance retorted, none too happy with the remark but still following after him. "Just make sure _you_ don't do anything hot-headed."

"I won't." he replied, heavily, somberly, but far from a semblance of conviction.


	10. It Comes Awake

**T** **\- one varga**

As they advanced deeper into the city, the Paladin's suspicions didn't take long to be confirmed.

They first time Lance saw footsteps in the ground, he assumed they were their own and that they had simply passed this part of the city twice, but before long they encountered far more of them than the two of them could possibly have caused without much deliberate effort.

Understanding what this meant, the two of them made an effort to stay undetected, sticking close to building walls and attempting to maintain cover, all they while knowing that a lucky sweep from above might easily give away their position, and mindful of how they would not be able to recognize their enemies by sound with no atmosphere to carry the noise.

Even so, their efforts were not exactly futile, as they soon realized.

Keith was the first to notice, whirling around, bayard in hand, and assuming something resembling an attack stance, somewhat startling his fellow Paladin as he did this on very short notice, from one moment to the next.

"Whoa! What's the big idea?!"

"I think I just saw something move."

Before long, Lance had located that 'something' , nodding at it from behind the column behind which the two boys had assumed cover.

It was one of those Galran Sentry Drones – not, as they both quickly noted, the ones they were used to, but what was presumably a reinforced version intended for more extreme environments, but even so, the general designs and huge red sigils were still very recognizable.

With the Diagnosis confirmed at a glance and the enemy sighted, it was barely a heartbeat until Keith leaned forward, his body like a coiled spring ready to release, the blade of his bayard flickering to life in a flash of crimson – it's like Lance's words from just a few minutes ago had gone in one ear and out the other.

"Hey, wait!"

"What _for?_ "

"We're supposed to collect intel. Let's see what they are doing here."

Despite his earlier hostile tone, the mention of the mission was enough to make him back down; he saw Lance's point, but remained in his attack stance, prepared to pounce at any moment.

So what _were_ the sentries doing down here?

Some of them were apparently just standing there, while the others were in motion.

The pattern as a whole did not begin to make sense until the first of them reached was was supposed to be their destination, and proceeded to cut a rectangular block of the mysterious material out of the nearest wall with an inbuilt welding tool that uncomfortably reminded them of Shiro's mechanical arm. The resulting stone block was then loaded onto one of the inert sentries, and then, rinse and repeat, as the standing robots could probably carry several of these.

"They should be heading back to the base once they've got all the stuff." Lance concluded, already about to formulate a strategy. "Let's follow after them. They should lead us directly to the airlocks – we could try sneaking in along with them. If we get lucky, we could get in there without being noticed. It sure beats slicing open a wall, we'd just give away our position right away by flooding the whole place with water – and besides, an underwater base is probably gonna have some automatic mechanism to seal off breaches. This might be our best bet."

And here, Lance's usual internal monologue about Keith's typical shortfalls was interrupted by an unwanted intrusion of Hunk's earlier theories – because, for all that he tended to lack any sense of self-preservation or moderation, it was not all that unusual for him to listen when someone proposed an alternative that included an actual, workable plan for him to follow instead – even if that someone was Lance.

Keith didn't dispel his bayard, but he didn't barge off either, instead keeping himself in a distinct state of being ready to strike, but following along with Lance's suggestion.

 **T - half a varga**

"Man, " the Blue Paladin observed when the sentries finally departed. "Pidge would have a field day with this!"

Though not known to have a great eye for aesthetics or given to frivolous observations, even Keith had to admit that there was something intriguing, even mesmerizing about the buildings and structures they encountered, even with the limited superficial impressions they got while sneaking through the city's structures – they could never stop too long to smell the proverbial roses or inspect the inside, lest they lose sight of the sentries they were tailing.

By contrast, the Galra base greeted them with the approximate elegance of a brick, once they actually found it nestled next to the mouth of a cave system adjacent to the plateau.

It did not appear much different from any of the other comparable bases they had seen and, at times, stormed, the same multipurpose designs suited to all manner of extreme environments.

They encountered no close-range defenses because, again, who would be crazy enough to storm this facility on-foot?

They might be searching for the Lions near their landing site and keeping their lasers powered up, but may have relied on the planets' oceans as a kind of super-moat.

Now, of course, the Paladins were getting to the part of _why_ no one would have expected such a crazy strategy: It would be the two of them alone in a fully manned outpost.

The last person to infiltrate it had never returned and they, at least, had the benefit of _looking_ like them and presumably having some cover story to explain their existence.

If Keith and Lance were seen, they had no choice but to kill or incapacitate whoever saw them before they could alert the rest of the base and with every crewman who might be found or missed, their odds of remaining undetected for much longer dwindled away.

Even so, they followed the sentries until just before the air lock's outer door was about to open – Lance blasted the first few he could get and by then, Keith had already rushed forward, cutting his way through them as if they were wheat, and he an errant visitor intent on leaving a crop circle, placing himself in the doorway to prevent its automatic closing while cutting down the last ones – admittedly, they did not put up that much of a fight when they were carrying tons of whatever these odd blocks were supposed to be made of.

With little means of transporting them, Keith and Lance had little choice but to leave the spoils where they were, right outside alongside next to the remains of the sentry drones – they'd just have to hope that they had some time before the next time it was due to be used, but there was little about this mission that _would_ have been safe or certain apart from the undeniable dangers – with the last one down, Lance hurried to join his comrade in the airlock, and once the water had drained away and the pressure equalized, it was Keith's handprint which unlocked the second gate.

 **T - 20 doboshes**

The Paladins were ready for everything as it opened, both keeping a tight grip on the bayards, but for now, they got lucky – the base crew were expecting the enemy to arrive as spies inside their own ships, or enemy ships arriving from the outside – no one was here to keep close tabs on what was essentially an automated process, even if it involved the doors -

Even so, just standing there in the hallways made it impossible to avoid the realization of just how exposed they were here, out in the open where they would stand out like sore thumbs.

They might have gotten lucky here, but that only meant that their inevitable discovery was yet to come and could strike at any moment – and since the local forces had previously encountered spies, they probably _did_ have patrols on the inside, whom they could run into as soon as they took that turn at the end of this corridor – or rather, _if_ they took it.

Leave it to Lance to locate an alternate route in the shape of an air vent.

"Let's break that open."

"Isn't that the first place where they'd expect a spy?"

"I doubt it..." Lance commented as he "It's not big enough for one of them. Heck, even Hunk or Shiro would have trouble getting through there."

"Maybe..."

"What else are you gonna do, just charge the first patrol we run in?"

"If we work quick, we might be able to pick them off one by one."

"And if we don't, we'll have a whole platoon against just the two of us. What a safe and reasonable decision, _boss_!"

Keith couldn't have hidden his displeasure if he'd wanted to; he outright growled at this, flashing his teeth more at the universe than anyone in particular, but to his credit, the next thing was to move ahead, saving his anger for the air vent as he worked to pry it open with his bayard.

One the metal grid gave way, he went in head first, whereas Lance was somewhat more relaxed about climbing inside.

"It's almost a bit claustrophic in here," he remarked, still figuring out how to bring his gangly legs inside. "Good thing you're short."

"Wait!"

Startled by his comrades' sudden sharp interruption, the Blue Paladin inadvertently hit his head on the air vent's low roof, which, thought cushioned by his helmet, was still not a very pleasant experience.

"Climb in the other way around, I need you to be able to see what's behind us in case we need to hightail it out of here. We never know what happens..."

Lance had to admit that this was actually a pretty good suggestion, though he was none too happy about having to climb all the way back out with his head still faintly aching.

He made sure to place the grid back on the opening as he climbed in, trying to proceed through the shaft in this odd, backwards position without tangling his legs with Keith's.

Even so, he proceeded straight through the narrow darkness, the whole universe seemingly condensed to a space too minuscule for Lance to even kneel properly, and it just went on and on – or at least that's what it felt like.

He could hear Keith working his way through the ducts, but that did little to brighten up the Silence – if anything, the Blue Paladin felt vaguely anxious that his comrade might be moving faster than he could keep up with, which gave him good reason too hurry... though perhaps, it motivated him a little _too_ well.

"Hey! Watch where you're kicking!"

"That's easy for you to say, you can actually look ahead! And, on top of that, you actually fit in here without hitting your head..." he continued, rambling on casually but inwardly looking for some conversation that would keep the tension far from his conscious awareness. "How come, actually?" he went on. "I mean, aren't you supposed to be part Galra? They're all huge. I'd understand it if your mom was the human, but didn't you say that your dad was the human? Was he, like, really short?"

" _No. He wasn't_." Though immediately self-conscious of his initial irascible outburst, the Red Paladin still struggled to moderate his subsequent additions. "I Just. Don't. Know, okay?"

And then, after taking a moment for a deep breath and a long blink: "Let's just... focus on getting through here, okay?"

As much as this grated on his nerves, Keith knew by now that goofing around was simply Lance's way of coping, to keep himself feeling excitement rather than fear; To someone of his more extroverted nature, talking in a situation like this must be a relief.

But he knew that only because Shiro had brought it to his attention, one time he'd complained about Lance's refusal to take anything seriously in a moment of frustration. Shiro, for his part, thought that Lance was a lot more mature and concerned with his team mates than he let on – it was one of the things they'd discussed after the mission briefing and once again cemented how Keith just didn't have the gift for managing people that Shiro had.

As the one in charge of this mission he really ought to be reassuring Lance, not snapping at him for his (however nerve-grating) attempts to keep it together, but the last thing Keith felt like dealing with when he was already under pressure was _being talked at._

He ought to be able to but that aside – and in a sense, he was: He didn't fear death, and he understood well that he was now a part of something much greater than himself, something that might impact the fate of the entire universe.

Furthermore, he knew what he was doing and what he was capable of. He knew where his limits were, and even if he might choose to go beyond them, he knew he had all he needed to find a way by any means necessary – but that was as far as he was considered.

Had Keith been alone, he might have been perfectly calm right now, for all that this would make his odds even grimmer. But he couldn't just concentrate on working it out somehow when there was another person to think about whose limitations, abilities and reactions he was not quite as familiar with.

Still – he had to work with what he had. He knew better than to think that he could afford such petty personal limitations when they were fighting a serious war with limited resources.

 **T - 7 doboshes**

They continued their crawl through the dark, for so long that they must both have been wondering if their constricting one-track path even lead anywhere at all and if they were not headed directly to the bases' atmosphere control machinery, discounting more subjective yet very much felt possibilities such as 'certain doom' or 'nowhere at all'.

But then, Keith's searching hands happened upon a clue.

"Careful, there's a turn up ahead," he warned, and, as he rearranged his body to turn around the corner: "I see a couple of vents up ahead. We're getting somewhere."

"At last!"

"I'll move ahead to the second one."

This left Lance to the comical task of braving that same corner feet first, an undertaking which was undignified and uncomfortable, but not a real hurdle when all was said and done, though it occupied him long enough for Keith to make it past the first and to the second vent, shooting a glance out the first but waiting until he got to the second to confirm his initial diagnosis:

"Both lead to the same room."

"See anything?" Lance asked, unsure how to read the shuffling noises from the direction of his feet; Once he'd negotiated the turn, he _did_ notice a faint light, most of which was, at the moment, blocked by his own limbs.

"Seems like... no. I think this is just the mess hall. Let's keep going." As soon as he'd spoken, Lance could hear his fellow Paladin returning to motion – and felt all the more incentivised to push ahead to reach the light himself.

"Wait wait!" he called, as loud as he dared with the vents right there.

To his credit, Keith stopped in his tracks before the Blue Paladin got around to explaining: "Is there someone in the room?"

"I can't see all of it, but there's at least two pairs of boots under that table."

"And they`'re not sentries?"

"I don't think so."

"...figures. Robots don't exactly need to eat."

"So what's your point?" the Red Paladin's voice retained some of his previous exasperation, but wasn't altogether hostile, despite what one might have thought.

"Just wait and let me get a look..." Lance argued just as he was finally reaching the vent and attempting to turn himself in such a way as to get a good look through it.

Indeed, he recognized s few rows of benches and tables bolted upon the floor, and somewhere further in, two seated figures in the usual Galra uniforms, though he could only make out their legs and knees; One of them was noticeably burlier than the other.

"Can you hear what they're saying?"

 **T - five doboshes**

"...how long till that fleet gets here, anyways?"

"Half a quintant at least!"

"I can't wait to be out of here, and let me tell you, I don't envy our replacements one bit. This place has been giving me the creeps since day one. It just _feels_ wrong..."

"That's probably precisely why those druids have such high hopes for it..."

"Still, I almost envy Zaltrec and the others for getting to get away from here for the search, even if its just to find whatever they shot down with the prototypes..."

"I, for one thing, still think that it was just a sensor malfunction. Those Druids were just itching to try out their new toys, what are they calling them again?"

"Entropy Charges."

"Whatever. If there'd been anything there to hit, Zaltrec and the others would be back with the debris by now..."

"Unless..." and the sleeker of the two dining warriors used something like a joking tone when he said this, "The enemy escaped."

"Impossible! Those missiles may have been immature prototypes, but I was there for the latest batch of tests. I'd like to see the sort of material that could withstand that without having a serious hole molten into it."

"Then could they have been vaporized?"

"I still don't think there _was_ any 'they'..."

 **T - 2 doboshes**

"So 'Entropy Charges' it is then?" which, in itself, told Lance absolutely nothing. It was all nerd words again, leaving him to lament the absence of his comrades once more. "That has something to do with heat, does it?"

It was a small comfort, at least, that Keith seemed none the wiser. "I have no idea. But now, we know that there are Druids on this base... If we run into them, that could mean a load of trouble... I wish there was some way to blow up this whole base without fighting them directly, maybe if we could get to the engine room..."

"You seem to be forgetting that we're still _in_ this base..."

But in the end, it was not their plans that forced the hands of fate, but an incidental, careless movement that was carried out without conscious attention.

 **T = 0**

Let's explain it like this:

Though the air vents were, quite deliberately, too narrow for a (fully Galran) person to fit inside, this was a civilization that had been using advanced technology for ages, such as, say, recording devices housed in robot drones – with that in mind, even a narrow air vent located in such a facility would contain scanners intended to detect any unauthorized technology, placed along the length of the vents in various intervals – and one such device happened to be placed where the the ventilation shaft was due to pass through the mess hall's wall, presumably, to more important sections beyond – but where it ultimately lead, the paladins would never find out, because the moment they passed the sensor's location as if passing by some invisible tripwire, blaring alarms flooded their ears and, presumably, those of everybody on the station.

And so the case which the paladins had been aiming to avoid for as long as possible came to pass without a moment's notice, from an instant to the next, at the motion of a wayward finger.

 **T + 1 tick**

Keith's reaction was automatic, with no time left for thought or confusion: "Out, out, **out!** "; Whatever countermeasures the security mechanisms of this facility may have been equipped with, neither he nor Lance could afford to find out.

Thus, the Red Paladin took a moment to secure his hands against some rail or junction in the shaft, and pushed himself back to the light source behind him – as for the Blue one,he had not actually come that far beyond the slits of the second vent, and simply _functioned_ like a well-oiled gear or well-trained muscle responding to the decisive, commanding voice ahead, and, in an instant, materialized the bayard which he had previously shrunken down to its inactive form, blasting the vent's coverings out of its sockets – now, his weapon was built more for precision than strength and therefore, merely sent the cover flying where a comparable point-blank shot Hunk's canon would have molten it into sludge, but right now, this very much served their purpose as they might well have burned themselves on their way out if the structures had gotten significantly superheated -

As it was, Lance could easily and swiftly slip outside, arms first, coming face to face with the two Galra soldiers from before, who had scampered to their feet the moment they heard the alarm bells – but even so, they were ill-prepared, their helmets set down by the table, themselves stuck between the benches and the table, without the option of breaking into a run right away.

Lance would have preferred to avoid such drastic measures, but he knew that they would not be terribly bothered by such scruples if given the chance to reach for their firearms on their uniform belts, so, he swiftly dispatched them both with two clean shots.

However, the low angle from the air vents had only afforded the Paladin a rather incomplete view of the room, and so, the sentry-slash-cooking-robot situated behind a counter near the mess hall's left wall had eluded his notice until his attention was drawn by the buzzing of a charging weapon, sparkling muzzle pointed right at his face –

And dissipating into a puff of smoke once its circuits were cleaved in two.

It takes a particular kind of person to throw one's sword – for one thing, they must be very certain that they will actually hit their target point-blank and take it out in this one shot, for else, they would have rendered themselves defenseless by launching their only weapon into the distance.

It was a move worthy of a red Paladin, not just for his accurate throw, but how he'd pulled it off right after slipping out of the air vent behind Lance, in itself a testament of enviable spreed and razor-sharp reflexes.

Even so, it may not have been quite fast enough –

Lance was spared from death by laser, but he couldn't escape his conclusions: "Quiznak. That thing saw us, _and_ probably recorded visual on us. They _definitely_ know where we are now."

"Then we mustn't stay here for long. Let's get out of here."

"Keith, this is a base built by a space-faring civilization. They probably have cameras, or scanners or something, and you can bet that they're locked onto us right now."

"That's _why_ we have to keep moving. We have to take them down fast before they can crowd us, one by one if we have to. I don't think we can take them all at once with just the two of us."

"You want to fight your way through this whole base? Keith, this is crazy."

"It's our only chance. We have nowhere to go. If we try and leave now without a ship or anything fast like that, they'll just use us for target practice."

"Keith, this is dangerous... There are probably over a hundred sentries on this base, and a few dozen personnel. We can't outrun them all – if we meet just a few more than we can handle, that's it. It's just too risky. "

"Of course it's risky!" the Red Paladin retorted, as if he'd found something fundamentally incensing " _Everything's_ a risk, just being _here_ is a risk, leaving your _house_ is a risk, nothing is ever _without_ risk. Anyone we know could die at any moment, including us. You never know when you're going to be hit by a car, or fall and break your neck, or drop dead from a random blood clot."

Lance was a bit taken aback by this rather spirited display; Not that he'd never seen an angry dude before – it was more about the view of the world that seemed implicit in these statements, this image of it as this unsteady whirlwind of shifting sands, and Lance's inability to think of a counterargument that would prove in a clearly apparent fashion while he was strictly speaking wrong.

Though his being at a loss may not have been a bad thing altogether, because Keith wasn't done yet: "Of course there's a risk. I know that. We both knew that when we agreed to come on this mission. It's one thing if you can think of some safer thing to do that will increase our chances, but if it's a choice between something that _may_ be a risk and something that is _certainly_ unacceptable, we can't afford to stand around without acting just so we can keep pretending that we are somehow safe in the middle of a war.

In case you haven't noticed, _we're not!_ No one is ever safe!"

Realizing now belatedly that he's gotten somewhat worked up, the Red Paladin let out a deep sigh and took a moment to focus and wind himself down.

But unlike what he might be thinking, Lance was well past criticizing him at this point.

Instead, he thought that he was beginning to understand something about his teammate which he hadn't really realized until now.

His view of Keith had always been tinted with his envy, his most pronounced, important traits being listed as the ones that either caused Lance to be jealous of him or could be used to tell himself why he wasn't such a big deal after all. So he hadn't really looked at him as a person with a perspective and motivations that may be completely unrelated to whether they annoyed Lance or not -

And it was one thing to be reckless and reactive, all things considered, but, there was something of real dedication and determination to his rival's personality, of real sacrifice even.

It wasn't that he didn't exhibit bad judgment at times, but it seemed crystal clear to Lance now that Keith hadn't done things like charging Zarkon simply because he was overeager for fights and hadn't considered whether he could actually win, but, because he hadn't _cared_ if he could win and was ready to pay whatever price it took to keep the Black Lion out of the Emperor's hands, up to and including his own life.

He was reminded of Pidge and how she'd once say that her gigantic connection of nerd knowledge was, to her, simply her own, roundabout way of connecting with the world, or perhaps just one that suited her particularly well -

Keith may not have been the world's most sociable person, but his actions spoke volumes about what he was ready to do not just the team but the many, many citizens of the universe who were looking to them for hope.

It wasn't just mere recklessness, at least not _just_ that – there was an element of deliberate choice to it.

It struck him there that his rival was, despite all his faults and shortcomings, a young man of exceptional honor.

It wasn't like he didn't know it or would have doubted it, not after working with him in close quarters for so long, but he'd never become conscious of it as an isolated fact in this manner; Even now it was apparent as he looked Lance directly in the eyes with his severe wisteria gaze.

"Look, I can't force you to follow me, and I can't do this if you don't come with me, so in the end it doesn't really matter that much what I think, because it's all up to you.

So, are you with me?"

Lance nodded with surprisingly little hesitation, grabbing his fellow Paladin's hand, with may have looked a lot more epic if Keith had been expecting it instead of appearing rather visibly surprised by it, leaving his teammate to awkwardly grip at his fingers.

Even so, a brief look passed between them, and then they set out.

 **T + 10 doboshes**

Very soon after leaving the mess hall, they were met with a war of sentries that the station's commanders had presumably gathered from nearby positions.

Weapons pointed forward, they relayed a demand for the Paladins to surrender themselves, but Keith only had one answer for them:

To charge straight ahead at them and take them out before they could fire, through some managed to hit the floor behind him before he mowed them down.

Of course, there were more of them than would fit in the range of the Red Paladin's weapon at any given moment, so Lance resigned himself to cleaning up any sentries that made an attempt at taking him out from a distance.

In that sense, Keith was lucky that he'd taken the Blue Paladin of all people – Hunk's or Pidge's weapons may not have been suitable to pick off enemies with precision without risking friendly fire.

Their 'strategy', if it could be called such a thing, was hasty, cobbled together mess of sudden emergency, last-moment reactions with little breathing room in between, but unsightly and brutish as it was compared to the slier tactics Lance would have preferred, it got the job done; One by one, their enemies were blasted away with extreme prejudice -

Even so, two sentries were still standing when the next wave arrived, and with them, a grizzly-looking, scarred security officer with pronounced canines that popped out past his lips and an impressive ridge of horns lining the top of his skull.

Keith, of course, went straight for the prize at the expense of everything else, leaving it to Lance and his bayard to protect him from death by sentry or laserguns to the back.

The fearsome Galran was almost twice Keith's size and three times his width, but if anything, that only increased the ferocity of the Red Paladin's fearless charge.

And though he probably had more experience than both Paladins combined, the imperial soldier seemed taken aback by that first, powerful strike – perhaps, he had not expected such fierceness in such an opponent so much smaller than himself, or maybe he was simply not used to guarding against a left-handed opponent, but either way, he parried the blow and when he struck back, it was with considerably more force;

His first swing had been confident and broad, as if he'd been expecting to dominate the fight just by virtue of his size and experience, but after crossing blades just once, he knew in his bones that the creature he was fighting was not to be underestimated.

Both adversaries went at each other with roaring battle-cries, bared teeth and brutal, inelegant movements, holding nothing back, two almost bestial combatants who had nothing to lose but their victory.

It was, in short, a fight between fellow Galra -

But as much as Lance might have liked to watch the spectacle, he had sentries to take care of, and, indeed, spotted a few more speeding down the corridor. He could not afford to lose focus for a moment, for Keith's sake as well; Given the speed with which he was hacking around the battlefield, Lance did have to take some care not to hit him – which was also why he didn't dare to try getting a shot at his opponent.

In the end, Keith was not altogether wrong in focusing his attentions on the old warrior – perhaps, he had instinctively sized him up right away and realized quite correctly from something about his stance or bearings that he was not your average mook and would require special attention to defeat.

The old warrior was good, but so was Keith.

He may have been utterly average at the kind of abstract theoretical reason that Pidge so excelled in, not unskilled, but not exemption either at the practical, hands-on that was Hunk's area of expertise or Shiro's tactical brilliance, nor outstandingly gifted with the sort of sneaky guile and ingenuity that Lance used, and he was altogether lacking in Coran's kind of street smarts or the Princess' gift for diplomacy and managing people;

But if once concerned oneself with the cunning, perceptive animal mind, he was, without doubt, a prodigy, a genius of the reptilian with its hostile, icy calculations and, in that specific narrow sense, he could be quite analytical.

He may not be able to explain in words how he was reading his opponent's movements, but he was most certainly prepared for them, and giving his bigger, badder opponent one serious fight – but the man was more adaptive than the sentries' combat software and not as swift to defeat;

As impressive as the battle was, it might still not be playing out in their advantage precisely because of its dramatic development.

At this point Lance had long since cleared away the initial batch of sentries and now busied himself with shooting down any new ones before they could join the fray, but it was saying something that this task kept him quite busy.

"Keith! We're being stalled! Finish it!"

But it wasn't as simple as matter as just willing the battle to end – perhaps, this particular officer had been sent for this exact purpose, because he was one of their better fighters and could be expected to slow them down some. He would have to remember to expect an ambush at the next turn.

The Red Paladin must have understood the meaning behind Lance's words as well; In an instant, he dispelled his shield, took his weapon in both hands and swung it around with even greater truculence, and indeed, it seemed like he had the old master backed against the wall, at least gaining the upper hand through his youthful vigor –

Until something distracted him, bringing with it the revelation that his focus had not been complete in it's single-mindedness: "Lance! Watch out!"

The Blue Paladin didn't immediately realize what he meant – he'd expected the enemies to come from up ahead, since they'd cleared the room behind him; He wasn't sure how they got there, perhaps there was more than one entry, he didn't fully remember – but when he turned, one of them was already too close for him to aim and shoot, not when it was already charging its own weapon – but then, the processing units in its chest were cleaved in two.

So, the sword throwing thing again.

It was less of a good idea when there were still active opponents around, as the red bayard was now stuck in the dispatched sentry and the wall behind it.

Lance would have gone and fetched it but he had the other sentries to deal with and one more direction to keep watch of if he didn't want a repeat of this hair's breadth scenario.

Oh sure, Keith How-Is-He-Even-Real Kogane managed not to lose his neck by pulling out and activating his shiny heirloom knife in the nick of time, but he was on the defensive now, struggling to parry the ferocious strikes of an opponent who outranked him in both size and raw strength.

He grimaced, feeling each the seasoned soldier's blows ringing in the bones of his arms.

"I see now!" the Galra officer spat, dismissively. "You're with those traitors!"

He swung his weapon again and again, punctuating his words with his strikes.

"They must be pretty _desperate_ if they _resorted_ to recruiting a dirty little _mongrel_ like you!"

If Lance had his hands free, he would have shot that quiznacker in the back right then and there, but he didn't. He was probably regretting his words anyway, because, as he learned quickly, provoking Keith was not always a good idea. He was pissed before, but now he was raging, a storm of reckless, aggressive moves that could have whirled a lesser opponent away – but as Lance suspected, the elder warrior had much been expected that, and would not have taunted his opponent if he didn't expect an advantage from that.

Keith jumped at him for his next attack, but not only did the old master dive out of his way, no, as he swerved to the side, all the while maintaining his footing, countering Keith's weapon with his own and reaching his free arm forward in another direction to throw a simple punch as his opponent whose whole motion and stance had been focused in a different direction.

Keith immediately sat up with an angry grunt, but the Galra officer expertly parried his weapon, wresting his hand to the side to make himself an opening to grab the Paladin by the neck.

Of course, he refused to let go of his blade even as his wrists ached under the larger warrior's stronger force and, once free of his weapon, made immediate attempts to hack away at him with his own, but the officer was holding him up into the air with his proportionally long, burly arm, and Keith, despite his best attempts, could not land a good hit on him like this.

The tip of his ceremonial blade reached and scratched at his opponent's armor a few times, but not with enough force to pierce it.

"Stop struggling, you insolent little creature!" he cursed confidently, now raising his weapon to put down his prey. "Don't you know you can't win?"

He was somewhat flabbergasted when Keith just smirked of him through his pained grimace, until he felt the pain in his forearm.

Still hanging in the air, still in pain, still suspended from it, Keith had driven his weapon into the enemy's armor. The luxite blade cut clean through the metal, and the flesh beneath, leaving a trail of royal purple blood as he moved it to the side – To his credit, the seasoned warrior did not let go from the pain alone, but he had little choice when some of his tendons were severed.

Even with his length and now hanging on by a thread, he still executed the strike from his left, but the pain impacted his performance enough for Keith to dive aside and ram his sword deep into the warrior's side.

Finally defeated after so many years, his eyes glowed wildly as his mouth gaped breathlessly.

"What... _are..._ you?!" he gasped, incredulously.

"It's just as you said. I'm part human." Keith stated, as if this were somehow surprising. "Humans are beings of great tenacity and determination. They might seem like insignificant small creatures to _you_ , but that's exactly why they will fight tooth and nail to survive, and they never give up. Human blood flows in me, so of course I don't know when to quit. I owe it all to my father."

Calmly, coldly, he pulled out his weapon out for good measure, just before his opponent toppled, clutching at his wounds.

He then turned to retrieve his bayard, shrinking down his knife and putting it away before reaching out to pull his sword from the wall.

"And I'm just _part_ human. My Paladin comrades are all human, and none more so than our leader, the Black Paladin. He fought in your arenas and survived all the likes of you threw at him for over a year, and soon, he's the one who is going to _end_ Zarkon's disgraceful rule.

If your comrades find you, and you live, you would do well to pick the right side when that happens."

 **T + half a varga**

Once they were at it together again, the Paladins were able to hack through the backlog of sentries, though they were kept busy enough so that no discussion of what had just transpired came to be.

They were, at Lance suspected, met with an ambush at the next junction, but the adrenaline must have made the last battle feel longer than it was, because their enemies had not quite been able to gather sufficient crew to truly overtake them – a good number of them might still be out there searching for the lions' wreckages; They may well have been expecting an attack, but of the sort that would be best averted with their long-range lasers and well-oiled shield generators.

Three they encountered were valiant enough, but a breather exercise compared to what had probably been their superior.

They were not done dealing with the third one when a load of sentries burst from each direction.

One wondered where they had come from of all sudden and why they hadn't been sent in earlier if they had been close by – perhaps someone in the command center thought the poor fools were more useful as a distraction than as valuable forces once it seemed clear that their ambush had failed.

This wasn't going well – Lance was beginning to feel reminded of those open-ended video games where you had to outlast as many waves of ever increasing enemies as you could, but you could never actually beat it, only hold out longer than the previous high score.

They defeated all enemies, but after they did, they were both left panting and the few hairs that hung into the visor of Keith's helmet were sticking to his sweaty forehead.

"They never stop!" Lance exclaimed, leaning on the long muzzle of his bayard for a bit. "Have you already thought of how gonna get out of here?"

"We'll find a ship."

"And if we don't find one?"

"We'll figure something out."

"Can't you like, do your thing?" Lance wondered, only to be met with a rather dissatisfied but also confused expression.

"You know? That thing you do, where you make the Red Lion come and get you?" The Blue Paladin accentuated his explanation with a small wave of his hand.

"That wasn't anything I did. Red just... came and saved me on her own accord."

"But she was _reacting_ to you! Come on, at least give it a try. Maybe if you think really hard!"

Keith sighed. "It doesn't work that way. Let's just get going before the sentries get to us."

"Those are really troublesome! If only we found the place they're being controlled from, we could kick the butt of whoever keep sending them at us and turn them off for good."

"That sounds nice, but how would we do that? We have no idea where tho even begin looking for that control room..."

Then, it was the Blue Paladin's turn to smirk: "Leave that to Lancey-Lance."

 **T + 2/3 of a varga**

Next time they came barging into a room staffed with any crew, it was a group of engineers had, ironically, been at work at the bases' Lasers before the alarm had sounded – which boded well for their endeavors, engineers would be likely to know the bases' layout.

They questioned each one individually, and the Blue Paladin presented them all with the same ultimatum:

"Listen up buddy! If you tell us where the control room for the sentries is, we'll let you go, and you get a free pass at making it to the escape pods. If you don't... well, actually, I won't do anything`, but I can't speak for my scary friend over there. He's always had one hell of a temper..."

The first one tried his best to spit in their faces, the second one grimsly hissed the words 'Victory or Death', in their direction, but the third one talked, desperate to save his own hide.

The others were tied up and gagged at that point, but they _were_ listening and their increased attempts at untying themselves or making vocalizations implied that it was not a lie.

Since their source had already proven his readiness to stab any available backs, they did not deliver on their promise, though they left him out of the immediate reach of his rather furious co-workers.

Only after he was finished proudly waltzing out of the room did Lance notice that Keith was giving him a bit of a side-eye.

"Scary friend?" he asked, his expression between some marginally more dignified cousin of a pout and the 'skeptical eyebrow'.

"It was all part of the interrogation! You know, the classic 'good cop, bad cop' routine."

Keith did, not, in fact, know.

 **T + 1 varga and ten doboshes**

One cluster of sentries later, they found the control center.

They overwhelmed the officer inside it with a surprisingly efficient combination of their fighting styles, and with one swipe of his hand, Keith deactivated the sentries, including the last big clusters of them which their master had sent in this direction the moment he realized where they were headed – they were some of the last ones that had been recalled from their labors in the sunken city to help defend the base, but alas, they hadn't made it in time.

Before they left, Lance set his bayard's laser to its highest output and made sure to bust up much of the hardware, in case someone tried an override from another part of the ship.

 **T + one and a half vargas**

That, however was the last time they would encounter any crew.

Whenever they would storm a room, they would find it already empty, some with scattered equipment or other signs that they had been abandoned in a hurry.

"I don't like this..." Keith muttered, a brooding look on his face. "Where is the crew?"

"Maybe they all tried to escape once they realized that the sentries went down?"

"Some, perhaps, but that's not how they act most of the time. There's something else going on..."

And then, he looked up, facing a direction somewhere past the nearest junction, as if he could see some horizon.

"There's something in that room. Something important."

"Should we mess with it then? I'm not sure if we can afford to walk into a room full of powder right now..."

"We came here to investigate their new weapons."

Suspicious room it was then.

What they found was indeed a worthwhile and unusual sight, something that clearly pertained to the matter, it was a large, spherical room spanning several of the bases' stories, with a large, transparent central column filled with the eerie red-orange glow of some viscous orange-red material.

Then, there were various robotic implements and control panels, tables with science equipment, commode-sized analysis devices and even what looked like etchings of magic circles in the ground – to be honest Lance got major creepy vibes from the whole place.

The room was pervaded by three things: The ominous glow of the center, some unholy stench, and a serpentine line of conveyors from which, near its ends at the lower levels, hung a series of barrel-like containers, each painted bright purple with the imperial emblem printed on in red.

"Could those be our bombs? Those Whatever-charges they somehow got from the ruins?"

"They are, no doubt about it." Keith determined, his face contorted from more than just the smell. "I can... feel it."

"Very perceptive, _half-breed!"_

None of them could tell where that voice had suddenly come from, but they both noticed the temperature in the room dropping, the light dimming and the shadows seeming to dance the moment this deep voice resounded into it like some previously silent cosmic narrator.

But the most unnerving thing about it may have been the way it kept talking calmly and surely even as the Paladins frantically looked around for it, feeling the darkness swirling closer around them with every word.

"The relics you speak of were left behind by a species that attained a quite advanced state some 5000 years ago. They have long since perished, but to their credit, they were aware of the quintessence which ties all living things together. They were never able to manipulate it fully, and certainly never developed the technology to extract or refine it the way that we did, so they had to content themselves with redirecting or disturbing the already existing flow of quintessence.

We thought of this as a primitive, inferior and pointlessly complicated variant of our endeavors, that is, until Voltron returns.

The warheads you see here are nothing like the puny prototypes that blasted you out of the sky – once detonated, the material inside distorts the flow of any quintessence around it, chiefly in the direction of accelerating its dispersal.

What they bring forth is not merely head, but decay, time itself, the heat death that is coming for us all in the end!

But I assure you, _your_ deaths will not keep you waiting for much longer."

And on cue, a bolt of dark energy burst from the heights, released by a dark, robed figure standing on the railings of a higher level, one that they were both very sure wasn't standing there just a minute before.

Grabbing Lance harshly by the wrist, Keith sped forward to evade the dark blows that followed behind him, leaving crumbling, dark patches in the floor and suffusing the air with a sickly heat they could somehow feel even through their suits.

At last, the bombardment stopped short of a row of warheads that even the Druid did not dare set off, and behind it, the boys now tried their hardest to catch their breaths.

"This is bad..." Keith admitted, for the first time now showing traces of real worry or concern, and even a few stray sparks of fear. "It's that thing. I've seen it before, I know what it is, and I'm not sure I can beat it. I couldn't last time I fought one. "

"Whoha, it must be _really_ awful if even _you_ are worried."

Then, he faced up, his voice firm: "We have no choice."

But before they had a chance to look for the druid, the druid found _them,_ a flood of darkness dripping in from in-between the barrels, swiftly coalescing into a diffuse, shadowy future that was already reaching out a clawed hand to blast them with an orb of unholy darkness -

The Red Paladin's reflexes were swift enough to evade by a hair's breath.

The Blue Paladin – well, he was only marginally slower, but that margin made less than negligible difference - he was grazed, not by its full force, but enough proximity to leave a burn.

Immediately, Keith hacked at it with his bayard just to make it go away, even if he knew that it would merely dematerialize and appear elsewhere.

"Lance!"

"S'fine." he pressed through his teeth. "S'not as bad as it looks."

Even if that were true, the scorched black circle on his armors left plenty of unpleasant possibilities for what might be the case of the flesh beneath it.

But more so than the wound, it was Keith's face that stumped Lance: He did not expect that even his 'least favorite' member of the team would dignify his person with such an expression of bitter urgency. As he realized the full extent of his comrades' injury, his complexion turned several shades paler in less than a second, and Lance was suddenly, bluntly reminded of all his earlier words, about then then-theoretical scenario of being responsible for the loss of a team member as the one in charge.

Even under these circumstances, Keith remained decisive if nothing else, and grimly resolved to leave cover in order to draw the Druid's attention.

For all he had gained in experience since then, the fight still went lot like his first one back on the universal station: no matter how fast he could reach his opponent, they would just disappear and materialize somewhere else.

His previous strategy of taking it by surprise before it could cast whatever magic it used to disappear like that had not worked out, but it was the closest thing he had to a beginning, so he went for that.

This time he made sure not to bring his hands too close to its dark orbs, but that made it all the easier to block his strike with an orb of magic – and to take the opportunity to claw at him with their free hand.

Now, this Druid was probably lesser in rank and experience to some of the ones they had encountered before. Their strike did not leave the same kind of clowing- cursed wound which Shiro had once been afflicted with by what appeared to be Zarkon's trusted right hand witch -

but even so, there was clearly a preternatural force at work here:

They were, after all, using what basically amounted to their bare nails, but all the layers of Keith's armors merely slowed them down enough so that they did not go past his ribs or collarbones, but still nicked them painfully, leaving a set of open, bleeding gashes crossing from his chest to his right shoulder.

It hurt like a quiznacker, even in his adrenaline-flooded state, but in the end, it was the _left_ shoulder that was currently involved in moving his sword, and so he kept attempting to hack away at it as if following the wild steps of some savage ritual dance.

He mustn't fail to hold its attention for even a moment, because he knew _exactly_ where it would go the moment it was free to catch its breath, if it even required such a thing – He kept going because he had to, ever more frantic, struggling to keep up, fighting not to stumble over his own feet as he evaded certain doom by inches...

And then, there was light, coming from up ahead, blocked out by the Druid's silhouette like a shadow, and by the time it was over, the dark sorcerer had keeled over, sinking straight past where Keith was standing, the back of its robes smoking.

Tracing that shine to the muzzle of the blue bayard, Keith came to realize just who, exactly had saved his life right now – there was Lance, his smirk still strained by pain, sitting rather than standing, but proudly holding the smoking gun from which he now removed one hand to give his fellow Paladin a thumbs up.

"You said you couldn't beat it alone, but you know what? You don't have to.

That's what you've got your teammates for. We're there to help you, you know? Not just for you to worry your head and drag us along. Two heads are better than one, as they say."

Despite himself, and even with his wound still bleeding, Keith found himself chuckling a little, more at Lance than with him, but that same chuckle then softened into a simple, genuine smile.

"Thanks man."

"Can I have a hand?"

Keith dispelled his bayard and held out his arm, still holding his deactivated weapon.

"You'll have to do with my sword arm, the other is a bit busted."

Indeed, now that the immediate moment of adrenaline was beginning to wear off, attempting to do any sophisticated motion involving his right shoulder just sent jolts of pain radiating down his body.

Lance contented himself with holding on to Keith's wrist and helping himself up as gently as he could, though the Red Paladin still markedly grit his teeth, not that his teammate was much better off.

"Ow Ow Ow, this just hurts more and more."

"We must be near the stations hull here," Keith observed, perhaps as a means of encouragement. "Maybe we can find the hangars."

But their beginning optimism was met with a sudden, jarring end behind the next door they opened and stepped past, bringing forth sharp memories of the soldiers in the canteen and how they'd always spoken of Druids in the plural.

There, in long shadowy robes, stood another, calmly expecting the Paladins, and to his left was an important-looking officer in big fancy armor, likely the very commander who had been sending his men against them the whole time, armed with what looked rather like an oversized butcher's hatchet.

Furthermore, there was nowhere else to go: The room they had entered ended in a large window facing the caves, revealing that the alien underwater structures continued way inside of the caverns.

They had reached the other side of the base.

 **T + one and half vargas and one tick**

Outgunned, wounded and with nowhere to go, Keith reached a resolution.

He jumped ahead like he never _knew_ he could jump, a moment of life or death releasing a wild strength that he could not normally access, enough to take their opponents by surprise even if it was for the tiny, crucial moment he would need to carry out his desperate gamble.

He skewered the large, panoramic window with his sword, and pulled it out again as the first rivulets of water began to trickle through.

Immediately, the dark waters rushed inside with a vengeance after having been kept out for so long, and the water pressure made short work of the cracked windowpane, widening the opening substantially.

Everything inside was swirled and thrown about; There was no other way.

But in a spacesuit which, by its very nature, had to withstand extreme pressure differentials, radiation and speeding micrometeorites, the two Paladins didn't have the best odds, and through being flung against the wall hurt, Keith was nowhere near out of commission by the time the room was flooded.

Swiftly, he used the moment of confusion to tuck Lance under his good arm, finding him mercifully easier to carry once submerged in water – and once he was sure to have a good grip on him, he activated his jet pack like no tomorrow, speeding out the hole in the window, ahead into the waters, fast and yet faster, as fast as he could in the only direction he knew, out, out and further out without even looking back at whatever dark magics or fearsome weapons may be charging up behind him.

He saw no point in looking if there was nothing he could do about it, he just sped forward, little more than dead weight on the jetpack's propulsion, running blind towards the tiniest, most theoretical chance of success.

That is, until he saw a flash of red in the corner of his vision, and a pair of great jaws closing in on him.

"You did it!" He heard Lance's still pained, but nonetheless glad voice exclaim through his coughs. "You did the thing! You... saved us both."

* * *

A/N: So... that didn't exactly go as planned for them. I tried to give them both a good share of cool moments but in their own individual styles. It's quite intentional that they gradually seem to be forgetting that they were supposed to be arguing as things go on.


	11. Wild Mustang (Revving it up)

Alive they were, but for how long?

Floating in the empty oceans, the Red Lion was nothing if not an easy target.

Even with the saltwater still burning in their fresh wounds, the Paladins could not afford to dawdle.

"Lance, we-"

The Blue Paladin understood right away – he may have felt weak and just incurred a nasty burn, but at the very least he had both his arms and shoulders in useable condition; Without much further prompting, he reached out those arms to help his comrade to his pilot chair, where he pretty much collapsed, taking deep breaths to cope with the pain – Lance himself hung onto the seat to prob himself up – it was not unlikely that they'd been blasted with significant sprinklings of black magic in addition to their physical wounds;

But even in this state, Keith didn't allow himself more than a second of a breather, reaching forward to begin their escape – and sure, the Red Lion sped away from the immediate death zone that was 'right in front of the druid and the stations defense Lasers', but it was more of a sudden, stuttering spurt than a semblance of controlled flight.

It's Paladin was barely able to reach and handle the controls – he managed the initial spurt, but then found himself doubled over, with even his good hand distracted with clutching his right shoulder – and as he brought his fingers to the offending claw marks, he realized yet another detail.

"Lance... I think we've got a problem. This is bleeding way more than it should."

"WHOHA!" Lance, too, had been too occupied by the basic task of surviving to really take stock of his comrade, but his exclamation was not merely directed at the amount of fluid that was oozing out of the gashes in his armors, but the fact that it was _the wrong color_ , something neither of them had truly processed in the chaos of fleeing for their lives.

The shade was just off from what that unmistakeable, firecar-blood-red tended to be, not so different that it would seem inconceivable for his secret to have survived the simple scrapes and scratches of childhood, but still visibly, brightly, brazenly off when it was flowing down the white and red of his armor in greater quantities.

It was still a _reddish_ purple, a wine-maroon-burgundy that could pass for red if it were only a trickle of dark dollops, but still an unmistakeable mark of inhumanity, as much as the pale lavender tissues revealed beneath his skin by the ghoulish marks that marred it now.

Keith's own reaction was an immediate recoiling, the ever audacious, temperamental warrior actually _shying away in humiliation_ , scrambling to cover the wounds with his maroon-stained hand as he grimaced from the pain, which still seemed like the less evil compared to how exposed he felt at this moment. _"Don't- look-!"_

Yet still, he whirred into action right away when his sensors alerted him to a massive energy buildup – the bases' weaponry being charged.

He reached out again, sending the Lion into a fast impulse of motion right ahead, but that was all he could do – just trying left him leaning against the pilot chairs' armrest, struggling to stay upright as he groaned in pain.

Even so, he had some time before the Red Lion's inertia and contact with the water could slow it down again.

"This isn't working, " he concluded, his alien blood now dripping into his lap. Then, after much cringing and grimacing, there was a determined look, directed straight into Lance's eyes.

"You'll have to do it."

"Wait... what?"

"I can't pilot my Lion like this. You'll have to."

"But – this isn't Blue..."

"It's possible." Keith asserted with as much confidence and firmness as his pitiable state allowed him. "When Shiro and I crashed on that planet with the space lizards, I was able to pilot the Black Lion for a bit." he explained, his reluctance to reveal that particular fact evaporated the moment it became crucial to their survival. "We need to get out of here, and we need to get to the Blue Lion. Right now this is the best option we have."

As if to punctuate his urgent words, there was another beep from the sensors – two smaller ships had just been launched from the base – turns out they _had_ ships after all.

"We need to lose them. Lance, _now_!"

He still didn't think this idea to be much saner than Keith's usual strokes of genius,but with his forceful, impassioned manner of speaking, he could be quite convincing in a pinch – and perhaps, it wasn't like he had any better options.

So, he settled into the pilot seat as carefully as he could, mindful of both his own injuries and Keith's, as much as it was possible in a chair that was only meant to hold one person.

As soon as Lance sat in place, his comrade let himself sink onto the chair's backrest, closing his eyes to gather his strength but never creasing to give orders: "Now! Concentrate."

Gripping the foreign controls, Lance leaned back and closed his eyes – and at the very least, he was spared of his worst fear that there would be nothing at all as if he weren't sitting here at all, but the undertaking was no less challenging –

The Red Lion was willing to _hear_ him alright, but listening was different matter altogether.

Where Blue had always been a welcoming, supportive presence willing to engage with and adapt to him, the _Red_ Lion's presence didn't feel quite as pliable, rather it had its own very set-in-stone, defined presence, a strong wall of pure, untempered flame, unsuitable for anything but a being of equal vibrancy, alike in its purity of essence, and at first glance, that was very, very daunting in a manner much reminiscent of its designated Pilot.

But Keith was right: This was their best option right now, and hesitation was something they could not afford at the present moment.

Gripping the controls and leaning forward, Lance focused his whole being on the experience of the metaphysical connection, trying, despite his own reluctance, to open his heart and lay his mind bare as he would with Blue.

 _Okay. I know you probably don't like this anymore than I do, but I need your help._ We _need your help. Please. I beg you!_

But the proud and mighty beast could not be begged. Figures that it would be different somehow, after all, there was supposed to be a match to their personalities for the bond to work... perhaps he had to change his approach a bit. What would _Keith_ do in his place?

 _Heeey, Red Lion! Wanna smash some things? You up for some explosions? We'll do something reeeally crazy today, you're going to love it!_

No, of course not. It wouldn't be that simple. Nothing ever was. What was he even doing here? This was a serious matter – and again, he felt the tug of those somber, darker thoughts tugging at his mind, his more lighthearted attempts suddenly feeling very shallow.

 _I get it, this is a war and you've been fighting it longer than I have, heck, you lost your previous Paladin it didn't you? I get that it's not all about me. In the end it's up to you if you want to do this, I can't exactly make you. But don't we both want the same thing? To fight back? To get Keith to safety? This... this is serious, I know it is. That's why I have to do this. It's very, very important._

And the mighty Lion sprang to life, opening its capabilities and listening channels to its temporary occupant, and with a perhaps premature grin, Lance reached forward to make it move – and not a moment to soon, as the Galra fighters were just about to catch up to them.

The Red Lion moved – but it was not, in any sense, a remotely graceful type of movement; Lance's initial attempts at maneuvers had all the elegance of a drunken sailor and a fly that had been caught in the fridge, buzzing its way out in slow stupor.

"Keith, I- I don't think I'm very good at it."

"You don't need to be, you just need to get us away from here."

That was exactly what Lance had been trying to do from the very beginning, but the more he succeeded in putting distance between them, the more his bumpy trajectories flirted with the sharp cliff edges of the undersea mountain who foothills house the ruin city and the base.

"Keith? Keith? _Keith?_ "

The Blue Paladin heard a clear growl of frustration beside him, but other than that, its originator did not really act on his distemper, instead reaching out one hand and laying it on Lance's as if to guide him, the both of them gripping that side of the controls by themselves together, which was, at the very least, the slightest bit confusing because Lance was not left-handed.

"To the right!" commanded the Red Paladin, and Lance followed, because there was no time to do anything _but_ follow.

"Left! Up! Right again! Down! Right! Sharp left!" Keith, of course, was used to flying wacky maneuvers under often adverse conditions; It was as bread and butter to him, so that he didn't stop to think how he ended up giving all the orders. Lance, meanwhile, was quite used to and well-versed in the support role and had a good sense for how to follow when others started moving – increasingly, they functioned like pieces of the same unit or fibers of the same body as if their joint motions were one larger, indivisible process – but even so, there were tests:

"Straight ahead!"

"What? But-!"

"Straight ahead."

"There's a wall ahead, Keith"

"Just- _just do it_!"

Lance stayed on has unsteady course, and therefore, the Red Lion sharply grazed the thin edge of a cliff face, breaking off a sizable strip of the side of the undersea mountain – its pilots where thoroughly shaken up, but the collision itself swirled up a large cloud of dust and dirt in water, a shroud of cover which they much welcomed as a smokescreen for their escape.

(Hidden under a thin layer of settled rock and dust, with all non-essential systems turned off to the moment to avoid chance of detection in the short-term and gain a however temporary respite, the Red Lion may have settled, but Lance was very far from taking a breather –

Not when his friend-slash-rival had finally lost his battle to stay upright back when they crashed into the mountain cliff, finding himself thrown onto the floor, mercifully still very conscious, but nonetheless quite visibly in a miserable, pitiful mess of a state.

As soon as he'd brought their craft to a solid, stable standstill, he knelt down beside his friend, taking stock of the surreal, amethyst lifeblood that now coated most of is chest, his pale, fallow face and the beginnings of somewhat shallow breathing, as well as the pain that even he couldn't hide, bared sharp teeth biting down so hard they invited yet another trickle of reddish mauve from his lower lip.

He forced his eyes open and made half an attempt to turn away to conceal the foreign sight, but he realized almost immediate that there was no point to it.

But Lance's feelings at the sight were not quite what he feared they might be, not so much a matter of repulsing but of realizing how Keith was _different_ from a regular person in ways he did not fully understand. His unique hybrid physiology might not react like a typical human's, or, boiled down to the heart of the matter, the Blue Paladin didn't know what he could _do_ , or if anything he might think of doing to help would do harm or good.

"This is bad..." he admitted. "I think you'll need to cauterize it or something.

"I'm NOT firing my bayard at you, Keith."

"Then find something else, in the first-air kit maybe... you know where it is, right?"

"Keith..." Lance's voice was uncharacteristically quiet and breathless here and very far from any semblance of confidence. "Keith, I've never done anything like that. Not even with a human..."

"I _am_ human." he insisted, still making futile attempts to cover the treacherously purple gash in his flash with his increasingly unsteady hands. "Human enough to eat, live and breathe on earth for a good eighteen years- " He had to stop here, briefly, rapt by a shudder of pain. "And besides, human or not, it can't hurt to stop the bleeding, right? You have had first-aid training at the Garrison, didn't you?"

"Keith, I can't _do_ this..."

"You'll have to. Just figure something out, like you always do..."

"I just can't-"

"And if there's nothing you can do..."

"Don't even think of that!"

"Remember that I'm the one who got us into this mess in the first place – It's my responsibility as the person in charge-"

"You said that didn't matter-"

"It's not your fault. And tell Shiro that it's not his fault either. I chose this. I knew the risks. Promise _me_ you'll tell him-"

At this point, Lance's vision was blurring on account of his burgeoning teardrops.

" _Don't even say that!"_ )


	12. One Upon A December (Interlude)

"I'm sorry Ma'am, but I just don't think he's a fit for our family. Of course, we hope from the bottom of our hearts that he will find the right family for him eventually, but, I don't think he really bonded with us very much."

The boy they are speaking about is hearing it all though the slits and gaps between the creaky, old-fashioned door and the aged wooden frame containing it. He is not sure what he did to make those people think that of him – he never really minded them.

…

"Did that terrible boy get into a fight again? I wish he'd stop doing this... Goodness, he's all dirty from head to toe..."

"This is a young boy we are talking about! You'd think that you would have thought about wether you like children before coming to work at an institution like this..."

"It's not about children, it's about him. I have no idea what's wrong with that one. He just not childlike at all. He never cries or laughs... and there's the way he stares at you. Sometimes he creeps me out. None of the other children can be convinced to share a room with him... No wonder with all those fights he's always in. "

"Well, I suppose he is a bit aggressive..."

….

In the middle of the night, there's a sound, a slithter, a characteristic curling in the reflections of life.

He knows what it is; He has to know what it is and how to recognize it if he is to live here; he took precautions to prevent it from getting into the house, but he knows that no precaution is ever perfect.

He'll just have to deal with this; It's a simple fact of life as it has always been ever since there was life.

Calmly and expertly, he pulls the knife he always keeps beneath his pillow and gets ready to strike.

It doesn't occur to him that someone else should be taking care of this task because there is no one here for miles and miles.

The boy, now an emergent young man still shedding his chrysalis, had moved onto his late father's meager little lot of land as soon as his last set of ever transient watchers could be persuaded to let him do that, and they were not too hard to persuade.

His father left him money; It's not exceedingly much, but his needs are largely simple.

Solitude suits him, at least better than anything else ever did.

He tinkers, he reads, he wanders;

He builds a self-sufficient little world with everything he deems to need, like a kind of terrarium for people, or whatever he was supposed to be.

He dresses like he wants without anyone batting an eye.

He walks the desert dust until the scent of heat and drought are absorbed into his skin, remarkably at ease in the scorching planes.

He observes and sometimes rescues the occasional unfortunate hiker – who might be somewhat grateful or concerned at first but was usually relieved to be out of his presence once he failed to do much with their attempts at small talk...

And well, sometimes, he catches errant reptiles under his bed.

He knows how to do it, what to keep track off to avoid nasty surprises; His movements are practiced and confident, cold, as if there was some blood of reptile in his own family tree somewhere – and when he gets it, he decides that he's not done.

It's merely a spontaneous impulse but he sees no reason not to follow it. With great dexterity, he hacks off the head and tail and are carefully cleaves his prey in two, taking care to remove the spine and innards. Then, he throws it on the grill, because he's grown somewhat bored of tinned beans and corned beef.

He digs in, driving his canines into the flesh as if he were himself one of the beasts that roam out here, rather than anyone who had any business fearing them.

It doesn't taste like much, but neither does anything.

He used to be alone before, even if he had to deal with people, so coming here was not that big a change; If anything, it's liberation.

When he thinks of this place, he thinks of peace and of quiet and perhaps some distant, numbed-out melancholy creeping past the horizon.

But perhaps, there is also a distant tinge of nostalgia.

….

Sometimes, when he's spoken to people as of late, he remember as a time where he used to live in that shack and sit on that porch, back when that shack and that porch mean wholly different things, when his chubby little feet were small enough to swing of from that porch and his hair a neat little arrangement lovingly tucked under an adorable children's cowboy hat.

They were not rich or popular but they had themselves and they had, out here, unlimited access to an unending sense of adventure.

There was the milky way above them, its glittering band filling the sky far away from all light pollution, and there was an older man sitting beside him, a worn and weathered fellow who nonetheless spoke with a knowing softness.

"Looking at the stars, kiddo? Eh? Do you like the starts?" The man affectionately patted his tiny back, easily covering much of it with his large, firm hand which was notably calloused, but still warm.

"I used to dream of the stars too when I was a kid. I always wanted to go up there one day."

"And did you, Dada? Did you ever end up going to the stars?"

"Something like that I suppose..." he mused, more quietly to himself, though he soon noticed that he had drawn the curious glance of the boy's big, dark, eggplant-colored eyes.

"Actually, do you wanna know who's up there? Your mom!"

"With the Angels?" the boy asked thoughtfully, trying to piece his those statements together from what little understanding of the world he has gathered together from overheard conversations and cartoons.

"No, not with the angels... She's in a different place altogether, and one day, she is going to coming back."

….

And so he find him:

Messy nest of raven hair, gangly long limbs a snapshot in the midst of teenage transformation, sullen eyes eying him with suspicion.

Shiro simply sits down at the next table, giving him his berth of space and seeming none to uncomfortable, and he smiles – accomplished astronaut, wholesome role model, stalwart achiever, hero to children – smiles his gentle poster-boy smile, a humble, subdued everyday gesture without much artifice.

The youngster in black and red is none too impressed at first; He doesn't see the point of pretense, nor does he have any patience for it; The result, after all, is always the same.

"You know I know you're just here because Iverson wants you to, right?"

Shiro looks thoughtful for a moment, but doesn't consider himself rebuffed. "Enough with what Iverson wants. I'm much more interested in what you have to say."

….

He's not sure if it's a memory, or a confabulation, an addition or assumption, or perhaps an unrelated kernel of something genuine hopelessly corroded by many layers of hindsight.

There's one time he can think of, in which he clearly recalls his father fondly ruffling his hair, but doing that while someone else is holding him. He doesn't know it is but there's an obvious possibility.

Sometimes he thinks he recalls a voice, deep and coarse and resounding but nonetheless unmistakably feminine, powerful in the manner of a stocky opera singer, and though she doesn't sing opera, he does recall song, a booming contralto erupting in something that must have been more than just a lullaby.

Of course, he cannot say if that was her, or if there was a relevant, distinctive person in that picture rather than some incidental acquaintance of his father's – one thinks he should remember, if had truly been an orchid-skinned beast-woman involved in there somewhere.

….

He's certain that those dreams of her must be speculations of hindsight, though, a much later addition when he first had reason to suspect her to be anything other than an ordinary earth lady, and not a moment earlier.

She is frightening sometimes, a dark temptress embodying his darker impulses; At other times, he fills the empty vessel of her absence with wishful longing.

There's many ways she could look at, all of which could voice some facet or another of his subconscious, she can be deathly, elegant gymnast or a stoic assassin, at at other times, she is represented only as the silent little dagger that she left him.

But most commonly, he pictures her with a mane of shaggy white hair and thundering footfalls, a mess-mosaic of powerful muscles, life-giving roundness and bestial features with neither giving way to the other.

Before his mind's eye, she wears the teeth of a boar and clothes herself in the scales and spines of a reptile; She is gloved with the claws of a panther and crowned with the horns of a devil, and the steel of her limbs looks as if she had used them to shatter the skulls of her enemies and her eyes are made of molten gold taken straight from the cursed hoard of a dragon;

She is, to him, as the symbol he has made her to be for a life she was barely part of, a leather-skinned Behemoth-Warrior speaking intense words of pride; A Leviathan-Huntress from the lakes of the netherworld, her apparition like a mirage in the desert, arms crossed, spine straight, eyes glaring, like foreboding, or doom, or destiny, never speaking yet reminding him always:

"You are, and always will be a child of this desert heat, but do not forget that a part of you belongs only to the skies."

* * *

The timing was actually pure luck with this one. I'm actually proud of myself for writing this *before* the vlog came out. Now the ignorant masses are finally realizing what those of us with a eye for subtility (ie Keith fans) have been saying all along *evil laugh* By which I mean I'm looking forward to a future with much, much less Keith bashing!

If you'd like a visual, you can picture my interpretation of Mama Kogane as looking a bit like a mix between Steven Universe Jasper and a warcraft orc with some more monstery features in the vein of Zarkon or Narti. I don't think the common interpretation of her as a graceful feline makes any sense considering that she is related to Keith. In my book, she's a rude monster woman. It's logic! Our dear spicyboi has to get his spicy from somewhere


	13. Just Ride (Till I see Stars in My Eyes)

_You know when the initial idea for a fanfic comes to you as a particular scene but you realize you've got to write a huge wall of text before you can even get there? Well, this is the scene. Or one one of the scenes, another being the training room one and what will be the epilogue, but this was kinda the main one. Might be a little redundant after s3 & associated material came out, but I'll just let you judge for yourselves. It may have turned out anime-ier than expected because my sisters introduced me to "My Hero Academia" not too long ago..._

Just Ride (Tired of Driving Till I see Stars In My Eyes)

Fate next finds the Paladins in a hiding place, though not the same one we left them in; They had relocated to a more permanent hideaway, concealed in a sharp, jagged ridge of dense underwater mountains where they are less likely to be found anytime soon.

To their consolation, the immense vastness of this planet-wide undersea desert worked against their enemies as well and so, they were given a moment of respite, even if it was the uneasy kind that might be broken at any moment.

The Paladins had relocated into the Blue Lion's cockpit as soon as they reached its position, since it was better suited to the environment and somewhat larger and, as such, capable of carrying its crimson counterpart while its designated pilot was incapacitated.

Even in his miserable state, Keith had rather brusquely ordered Lance back to the pilot seat, determined not to let the mission come to a halt while he was still conscious – indeed, it was him who had located the Blue Lion through some ill-defined mystical means he did not understand; He could not name coordinates either, but simply pointed his finger, though Lance had to prop him up so he could look up at the screens.

Both their conditions had since been brought to some semblance of stability – it might seem anticlimactic, but, the Altean civilization would never have fostered an era of exploration, advancement and diplomacy if they didn't stock their ships with decent, versatile first aid kits.

Lance actually did manage to find something to seal Keith's wound with, and the Red Paladin took remarkably little time to go from 'faint and possibly bleeding out' to 'forcefully yelling orders', at least for the little while it took Lance to take off and escape.

One they got around to hiding away and and digging around some more in that ever helpful First-Aid Duffel Bag without the specter of imminent danger breathing down their neck, it also yielded some general purpose painkillers, ampoules of strangely-flavored electrolyte solution for replacing lost body fluids, and a few crayon-sized little vials filled with some rather interesting, colorful substances that were meant to prevent a person from going into shock – There was an entire set of those, intended for use by a variety of species, for use on allies and rescuees one might presume, no doubt, all in the spirit of the olden days' glorious coalition.

To avoid potentially fatal missteps, the various vials had been labeled in various Altean letters that denoted some classification of various sapient species according to certain biochemical characteristics which was, of course, utterly useless for anyone who hadn't spent their grade school days on Altea (or whatever the local equivalent was... grade school quintants?)

Luckily, the Princess' ever dutiful adviser had considered it one of his many duties to introduce Lance to some of the basics in case they were ever stranded and unable to get to the healing pods... or perhaps that claim of having to share 'crucial information' was just as excuse to keep the Blue Paladin from escaping one of his many rambles, but now, it was hard not to be grateful, and Lance felt compelled to thank those ancients Coran was always going on about -

He wasn't sure just how he had managed to retain the crucial bits out of the rather long-winded, anecdote-laden instructions which the older Altean had shared with him, but the moment he saw the vials, he recalled that the closest match for humans would be the pink one.

Coran had then, of course, gone on to list the matches for a whole bunch of different alien species most of which Lance had never heard of, half of which had complicated names he would have been unlikely to remember even if he had anything more than a string of random nonsense words to associate with them, but somewhere in between all that, he'd mentioned that the Blue one was for Alteans and that the green one would go with some species that were in the same category as the Galra.

Lance managed to dig out the ones they would need beneath a multitude of rather more mysterious remedies and implements, but not without coming across a stay reminder of Voltron's darker past –

Whatever the previous Blue Paladin had been, they had probably used the yellow vials, judging by the handful that Lance found stayed away in a side pocket for easy access, one of them half-empty – Its missing contents may have saved the brave warrior of the past in some of his penultimate battles, but the last one was over before he could even get to it; His wounds never had a chance to heal before his valiant spirit had leaked from them.

At the time, Lance took it for a bad omen which certainly did not help his then-mounting panic over his friend's deteriorating state – Keith wasn't entirely Galra but it was very apparent at this moment that he was not entirely human either; And sure, these things were designed to be versatile and work on a wide range of patients, but the truth remained that neither the 'human' nor the 'Galra' concoction was an exact match, for all he knew, _both_ might prove lethal.

Stripped of other choices, Lance took one of them in each of his hands and regarded them – Ideally, they would have come up with an all-new mixture suited to Keith's unique hybrid physiology.

At the very least, someone with knowledge of the chemicals involved could have made an informed guess as to which one would help;

But as far as Lance was concerned there were no two ways about it: All he could do was guess. That, or do nothing, but that might carry bitter consequences of its own.

As far as Keith himself was concerned, well, the Blue Paladin couldn't really make out what his comrade had been meaning to tell him at the time - his weak, slurred voice was not all that intelligible anymore, but even so, Lance understood in an instant, not just because he knew him well enough read the words from his plum-colored eyes, but because he recalled the way he'd spoken back in the underwater base.

Hesitate any longer, and he may not be able to swallow either concoction before long, whereas either vial represented at least half a chance at survival.

Compared to the Red Paladin's usual gambles, these odds were practically a bargain.

So, Lance did not even bother deliberating questions he did not know the answers to, and simply followed his gut on this one – Keith _looked_ mostly human, but judging by the long gashes which Lance had just haphazardly managed to weld shut, much of his insides followed the blueprints in his Galra genes, so green vial it is.

As soon as the Blue Paladin had made sure that his injured comrade had properly swallowed the solution, he downed the plastic-tasting mess in the pink vial and leaned back, taking several deep breaths, feeling his own pain and exhaustion catching up to him.

But surprisingly soon, Coran's little mystery vials delivered on their promises and, once medicated and appropriately hydrated, the Paladins soon found themselves approaching some semblance of stability.

Granted, they both still felt somewhat weakened, and while the pain was dulled to a level where they could work, move and concentrate without having all their attention taken up by their injuries, it never quite disappeared and occasionally served as a sharp, sudden reminder to go easy on their mistreated bodies which, after all, had just been exposed to a force they did not quite understand.

Even Keith, who had been all but out of commission, soon recovered to the point where he could move his right arm and shoulder as long as he was careful and was now, in fact, busy tending to _Lance's_ injury.

Their first-aid training at the garrison may have been pretty basic, especially since none of them ever specialized as a medic, but even so, it was geared toward teaching and conveying skills relevant to spaceflight and as such there were three particular scenarios that had been drilled into their heads due to their relevance to what might have become their workplace:

First: How to recognize and deal with various types of gas poisoning and air quality mishaps including pressure fluctuations, too much oxygen, too little oxygen, too much carbon dioxide and nitrogen narcosis.

Second: How to recognize radiation sickness and handle the aftermath, and Third:

Treating burns, as one might, for example, receive them from attempting to fix an overheated conduit – or, as it were, from challenging a scary space sorcerer.

So if the young Paladins knew how to handle _anything_ , it would be this. First, apply some cooling to keep the damage from spreading any further; Then, after handing the Blue Paladin an instant cold pack to hold to his chest, Keith had helped him out of the upper portions of his armor but refrained from ripping off the bits and pieces of Lance's dark under-suit which clung to the center of the injury, much like he had been warned against time and time again, trying not to dwell on the clear difference between the angry red, partially bleached-out or blistering tissue and whatever pale violet layers had come to light back when he had his very own encounter with a Druid's magic blast.

Next, a generous spray of disinfectant to stave off infection and then set about applying some ointment – Apparently, the ancient Alteans likewise considered burns a common space injury, perhaps due to the prominence of energy weapons, but in any case, the First Aid pack had contained a fairly specialized burn salve. The brick-red concoction was rather cool or perhaps even deliberately designed with a cooling effect comparable with the common tooth paste household remedy which it surely resembled in terms of consistency, and in the long term this was probably a mercy intended to further dull the pain, but a consequence was that the red paste rather stung in the immediate moment of being applied.

As a matter of pride Lance tried not to flinch but he was far too exhausted from the crazy ride just now for pride to represent too strong a motivation so despite his best efforts, he couldn't avoid a few audible sounds of discomfort – and under other circumstances, he might have complained or joked about the possibility that his rival was messing it up on purpose, but right here right now, it wasn't even a possibility, not when they'd just slipped past the jaws of death, so narrowly that the solemnity still hung in the air, and certainly not with Keith right before him, dead serious and still smeared with his own blood.

Try as he might, the Red Paladin was not the most soothing of nursemaids and went about the task with the taciturn concentration of a hunter setting a bear trap; His skillful handiwork could not be called into question, but there wasn't much in terms of a soothing bedside manner.

His somber dedication did justice by Lance's wound but that wasn't the only part of him which could have used some soothing; Having focused on the more pressing escape of escaping with their lives and addressing Keith's predicament, the Blue Paladin was belatedly feeling all of his own physical and mental exhaustion – being injured, tired, and flat out frustrated from the last few days as a whole, the least he could ask for was no more somber silence, and he would have given much now for Shiro's encouragements, or even the nervous observations and nerd-word speckled ramblings Hunk or Pidge would have contributed.

But he couldn't find the energy for, or see the point in complaining at this point, thus resolving to just grin and bear it – but even that was easier said than done.

"Ow! Careful!"

"Believe me, I _am_." came the swift retort, inevitably tense given their stressful situation, the Red Paladin's reactive nature and the dulled but still significant pain he was likely still feeling. "I know you might find this hard to believe, but this is not my first time doing this. I've spent a long time living on my own in the desert, I _had_ to know this kind of stuff. "

"Relax, it's not like I'm doubting your hermit skills, but that stuff _stings_."

Even though the initial exclamation that begun this exchange had been the product of reflex rather than deliberate thought, Lance caught himself drifting into a certain defensive attitude – not that the Red Paladin fared all that much better when it came to avoid getting riled up:

"And how is that my fault?"

How indeed?

Hunk's earlier word's came to mind, as did Shiro's admonitions. There was an easy, habitual pull to their tired old patterns, but honestly, how pathetic would it be if they started fighting right now, beaten up as they were, and after all they'd just been through?

Even if Lance had seen a point in trying to summon up his usual list of grievances, they would have felt hollow.

It was easier to be mad when he could take all the unfairness in the world and presume it to exist behind Keith's standoffish, opaque demeanor like the dragons in the uncharted corners of a map, but since their time at the garrison, he had acquired a deeper understanding of his teammate, and the cardboard cutout idea of him had slowly but steadily acquired breadth and depth.

To suspect contempt, spite or lust for destruction lurking there was no longer all that plausible; All things considered he was too blunt, too earnest for such a sentiment to be subtle, and too clumsy in such matters to methodically undermine Lance even if he'd had any reason to want to.

It was much as he'd said earlier – this was a harsh world where anyone could die at any moment, and in the grand scheme of things, they had far larger worries to contend with than some squabble born of puerile competition.

So the Blue Paladin yielded, allowing his comrade to finish with applying the salve and begin wrapping his prior handiwork in gauze and bandages.

"I'm sorry, it's just..." here, Lance allowed his voice to trail off, hoping that his remark would not be followed up, but as usual, Keith was not very good at taking hints, especially when that temperament of his was already in a somewhat riled-up state.

"Just _what?"_ he inquired, not even exceedingly brusquely, but certainly reinforcing Lance's feeling of being caught with his pants down through no fault other than his own and his inability to cease with his unsubtle pleas for attention -

And he was no longer so childish that he would demand to be left alone for the sake of playing it tough when everything about his behavior and attitude seemed to beg for the opposite.

It was time that he owned up to his needs and his strivings; For all he might wait, the resolutions he wanted would no longer come to him by themselves, as they did when he had all of his family catering to his whims, not when he was increasingly becoming, and very much longing to be someone whom things would be expected and needed _from._

"It's just that whenever I would get hurt as a child,the one to patch me up was usually my mom. Not that applying a few band-aids was such a big deal, but she always knew how to make me feel better. She would hug me and talk to me to distract me from all the gross stuff and the stinging disinfectant, and before I knew it, I had forgotten all about the pain and just went back to playing...

And now I'm here, halfway across the universe, hiding from some evil empire's killer lasers on the bottom of an alien ocean, and all I can think about is how she might never find out what happened to us..."

At first, he thought he could wrap this up with a sufficiently telling allusion, but once he found himself spilling absolutely everything, and to his grand rival to boot, Lance resigned himself to his fate.

There were a lot of things he could mold himself into, much he'd tried to become, but a closed-off solitary lone wolf was not and would never be among them.

He was a people person dammit, he wanted to connect with others and be acknowledged and accepted by them.

This at least was a definite constancy about his at times uncertain, chameleon-like self, something that was apparent only now when he felt its impact as a hard restraint rather than the versatility it usually conferred. For long he's searched to define himself, to find a niche or at least a gimmicky label for what he was; Rather than following any clear, singular trajectory, he had reached out a little bit in many possible directions, so it had been harder to detect a common thread – perhaps because it had been so simple, or so deeply fundamental to his being as to be taken for such a trivially obvious thing that he would not even conceive of questioning it or imbuing it with great significance -

He was so desperate o be wanted for _something_ that he hadn't really cared what it was and switched it up many times if the previous avenue did not prove fruitless, but all the time it never occurred to him that being wanted was itself something one could want, a legitimate desire in and of itself.

– and if that openness made him naïve, if that willingness to accommodate others made him bland, if this need to be accepted made him shallow, and if his desire to talk to others made him someone who merely blurted out goofy nonsense whose only value was that it was mildly entertaining then...

Well, that was a thought too painful to bear.

But however that may be, absolutely none of it would be solved by resenting Keith – For if his saving grace was to be that he'd simply been following his in intrinsic nature in his own, particular way, that rather than forever trying and failing at being something he was not, his way of being precisely himself was to adapt to what was needed, then he could hardly fault a comrade who could do just as little to help his own way of being, as inconvenient as Lance may have found it -

If Lance couldn't help the way he was, then neither could Keith.

Because no person had direct access to any thoughts but their own, they could not help but to look to their own experiences and feelings in order to understand the intentions and needs of others, what they need or expect. When we try to understand what someone else must be feeling, we tend to imagine ourselves in their shoes – and generally speaking, that approach is not even wrong: after all, people were more alike than different when it came down to it. In the end, everybody likes to be happy, and nobody likes to be hurt.

But even with all that in mind, one must not forget that people _can_ be different from each other and be disparate in their preferences, needs and priorities – In the end, even the Golden Rule itself has its limits -

Even if we sincerely endeavor to do right by others and hold that to do right by others is to treat them just as we would ourselves wish to be treated, how _they_ wish to be treated may be an entirely different matter – the minute differences between individuals make it possible for two people to see the same sights while pursuing the same goal having the same knowledge available to them and still arrive at vastly different conclusions, and so the most tragic misunderstandings are perhaps the ones that happen despite the best of intentions -

Thinking back, he couldn't really think of any definite moment that would prove beyond all doubt that Keith had ever been trying to out-compete him or where he's singled him out without prior provocation – Lance thought to have seen it confirmed between the lines of much circumstantial evidence, that there were enough incidents that _could_ be read in that way that he might just as well connect the dots along the most self-evident manner, but in hindsight, what he's come to view as 'self-evident' had been shaped by the circumstances of a life spent in a seaside paradise, safe in the lap of a lively, loving family.

Compared to that, Keith had – well, when it came down to it, they'd both spent their lives on Earth, objectively closer together than any other members of their team; For all of it azure splendor, the Caribbean certainly paled before the gulf of void, years and life experience that separated them both from Coran and nevertheless failed to prevent the Blue Paladin from finding some common ground with the older Altean.

But after hearing how Keith spoke of that world they both lived in, Lance felt like they might as well have spent that time existing in entirely different universes that were governed by entirely different rules, and if even the very basics looked differently to him, well, then it was hardly implausible to suspect that even their relationship looked rather different from where he stood.

Which is to say: Maybe Lance had only been _assuming_ that Keith had been trying to out-compete it, simply because that's how Lance himself would feel if he were faced with the same situation -

As someone who liked to meet new people and would always prefer to make friends with them if given the option, he didn't understand why anyone would want to keep to themselves; What more, given his 'the more, the merrier' approach to friendships, he couldn't think of a reason to stay away from someone unless he decidedly disapproved of them – to ignore someone was to deny them all attention, that is, to reject them, but in a manner that felt harsher than outright hostility -

It was the complete denial of all further chances, the refusal to as much as acknowledge their very existence, and all of that, for no ostensible reason – in other words, only something a jerk would do.

After all, if one subscribed to such a view of the world, there was no conceivable reason why anyone would ever choose Solitude of their own free will – the only reason anyone was ever alone was because they had no one to keep them company – either because no one was willing, or because one disdained all available persons.

According to this understanding, someone like Keith, who seemed very much comfortable, if not outright unfazed by long stretches of Solitude did not remotely make sense, and none of the few explanations that Lance could conceive of put him in a good light – Perhaps he cared nothing for them as a simple consequence of his general recklessness, or maybe he saw his comrades as so far beneath him that he would much rather spend his time with thin air.

That is to say, they were stranded in space with either an unhinged loose cannon or a pig-headed narcissistic showoff and Lance was not much inclined to trust either such type of person.

But that was long ago, before their journey ended up taking many of its eventual twists and turns.

As it stood, neither of those scenarios really meshed with Keith's genuine loyalty to Shiro, and despite his earlier doubts, even Hunk had ultimately come to believe that the Red Paladin very much _did_ value his teammates, and the Yellow Paladin's judgement could generally be trusted in these matters.

In the end, Keith could not help being an introvert anymore than Lance could help being an extrovert- both were perfectly valid variations on the human condition that each had both their perks and drawbacks.

Keith probably had his own struggles regarding that – perhaps hehad a hard time doing things which Lance did not even have to think about, and in any case, it wasn't like he had _chosen_ to be an introvert (or a good fighter, for that matter) – it was simply the way he was born, not some secret, deliberate plot to disrupt Lance's life.

For a person like him, silence was not always an ill to be remedied and its interruption not necessarily a boon to be cherished – For the most part, Keith was simply not very good at talking to people, and if Lance was honest with himself, he couldn't doubt that the Red Paladin very much knew it.

While he was far too blunt and direct to be described as timid in any way, shape or form, he often struggled with interaction in ways that would suggest that he found it to be a rather confusing, not seldom frustrating process that sometimes took an unforeseen turn for the humiliating, and he was not so lacking in self-awareness that he didn't have a certain self-consciousness to show for it – by contrast, he was usually at his most confident when he acted on his own, or at the very least, when he had some modicum of leeway to act according to his own judgment in the heat of the moment.

Though fiercely loyal, he did not easily fit into hierarchies and other larger structures of cooperation, and as a corollary, tended to relish the freedom that came with independence. Without it, he tended to feel restricted, like a once ferocious wild beast pacing in a narrow cage, for all that he might have been willing to do without it for the greater cause.

From his point of view, it may well be Lance who looked like an obvious jerk who somehow had it out for him while Keith had simply been minding his own business.

Stewing with thoughts such as these, Lance did not really have the nerve to speak up or even meet his comrade's eyes until the dark-haired half-human finished applying his bandages and handed him back his armor, leaving no more pretext for waiting.

Well then – he might as well get this over with.

"You must think that I'm really spoiled, heh?"

Keith furrowed his brow in irritated surprise, but Lance did not allow him to preempt his words:

"I mean, it's just as you said before. The world's a dangerous place and any of us could die at any moment. We've only just escaped with our lives, and here I am, whining about how I miss my mom and how it sucks to have no one to talk with. We're supposed to be saving the universe, but all I think about is how to get it to pay attention to me.

The longer we spend out here, the more I feel like I'm totally out of my depth. I thought this was my chance to make a name for myself, but I was really not prepared for this... I guess compared to you and the others, my life must have been pretty easy, and yet, _I'm_ the one complaining..."

"Why are you saying that? It's not like _any_ of us were prepared to take on some huge, intergalactic empire all by ourselves. I mean, it wasn't so long ago that we weren't even sure if life on other planets existed at all..."

"Yeah, but you all still dealt with it better than I did, I mean, I don't see _you_ crying for your mom..."

That comment had been meant as a humorous, ironic comment without any deeper significance, a mere self-deprecating joke to buffer the silence – nonetheless, the Red Palladin's eyes grew pensive, and his gaze as a whole showed symptoms of uncharacteristic hesitation.

He'd finished dressing his comerade's wounds quite a while ago, but it was only now that he leaned back, situating himself against the cockpit walls as if that little measure of space were to offer him some sort of protection, a modicum of physical distance to compensate for the wavering of his emotional guards:

"That's because I couldn't..."

In the case of Lance, it was the grave, heavy silence left behind by those words that struck Lance as defensive action: "Hey! Theres no need to rub it in after I already admitted it!""

"You don't understand. I literally _couldn't_ miss my mother, because I don't even know what she looks like.

In any case, it's got nothing to do with being tough or well-prepared. Who knows? If I had any idea what it's like to come crying to your mother, I might be missing it too – but as it is, I wouldn't know _what_ to miss about her..."

Lance supposed that this should not be a secret to any of them, not after Keith's heritage had come to light - after all, it had been as much of a secret to the Red Paladin himself, and how could that possibly be, if he had known that mother of his, and shared her roof, he ought to have known if she was human or not.

Even if she had used some manner of technological glamour to make herself appear human, her family was bound to have noticed something eventually. By definition, to live together as a family meant to let down ones' guard around each other – When Lance was younger, his older siblings had occasionally tried to hide their latest girlfriends and boyfriends from their mother, and early on, they might have succeeded through the skilled application of ruses and clever timing, but good ol' mom always saw through them in the end, if their snitching younger siblings didn't give them away first;

At times, it had been the most mundane of unforeseen circumstances that tripped them up; On other occasions, the most innocuous of details had given them away – the point being, Lance was pretty sure that he would have _noticed_ if his mother were secretly a huge purple alien.

Of course, it was an entirely different matter if his mother had never been there to begin with.

As much as Lance missed his own mom, he could take heart in the knowledge that she was at least _somewhere,_ out there among the stars, waiting for his return.

When he tried to picture Keith's situation, it was hard to even imagine it – Even if his mom were dead – a black thought he dared not to contemplate for longer than a heartbeat – he would still be left with the memories of her, and the impact which her presence had left in his life.

By contrast, Keith was left only with a vaguely defined absence, and a mystery that must be all the more vexing for the very few things that he did know:

"I mean, I don't even know Galra parents comfort their children just like human ones would.

Maybe they don't get all that attached to their offspring after they're born and leave them to fend for themselves early on, or maybe they're a lot more self-sufficient all the way from their early childhood – after all, even the Earth has a lot of animals who can walk and find food right after birth.

And as for what I said back inside the base, I'm sorry, I probably shouldn't have said those harsh things. I never meant to say that I'm right and you're wrong about everything. That's just how _I_ see things, because of my own reasons – that doesn't mean it's the absolute truth, I mean, if you got used to certain things because of your upbringing, then this should be just as true for me...

I guess I _can_ be cynical and suspicious about things sometimes – I don't know if I simply don't have that fundamental trust in the world and people because I grew up without my mom around, or if it's a Galra thing, but that's _my_ problem, not yours..."

The Red Paladin surmised, not without a certain bitterness – and for all of their differences, that feeling was not something that Lance could have misunderstood.

All his misgivings about Keith's person, all his prior reactions formed through the lens of his own understanding, and all of their earlier discussion concerning the differences in their attitude took a backseat to a more honest, sincere response; Lance may have been deluding himself, but in that moment, he thought he was beginning to understand what it must be not to have a family's support exactly _because_ he knew what the opposite was like, all the help and support his relatives had given him, both in the obvious ways and in the subtler aspects whose implications he was only now beginning to realize now that he had to do without them for the very first time, especially in a situation like this where he felt the full weight of their absence.

"So you don't remember her at all? Not even a little bit?"

Keith slowly shook his head.

"Did your father tell you anything about her?"

"A bit. He kept saying that she would return for us one day, but she never did. I used to wonder where she could be, and what she could be doing. There were times when I considered that my father might have been lying to me because he thought I was too young to understand the truth.

There were even times when I thought that she simply didn't _care_ to come back, that she had simply abandoned us all those years ago and forgotten all about us..."

"That's harsh, man." What else could Lance even _begin_ to say to such a story? He had been fortunate enough to never experience anything of that sort.

Even if he reminded himself that these sort of circumstances were ultimately commonplace even back on Earth, it still seemed to clash so much with what he

He had half a mind to blow off it all off with some lighthearted comment, but gave up before it even had a chance to fully form in his mind, renouncing his usual defense strategy in favor of honest surrender:

"Were really, _really_ different, aren't we?"

As Lance finally admitted this, he himself drew back, leaving Keith to his pocket of space and leaning back himself as he turned around to seek the support of the same-self wall that his comrade was already leaning on.

It was a gesture of both acceptance and dejection, a laying bare of doubts that he had not even allowed himself to consider in earnest before the events of this day.

"I mean, we're supposed to be teammates. Teammates are supposed to get along, and as far as everyone else goes, I think that I've managed as far as everyone else goes, even with Pidge, who wanted to everything by herself at first, and Allura and Coran, who started out as total strangers and came from a totally different time and place, but even though we were at the garrison together, I still can't really make head or tails of you, even after all the things we've been through...

I wonder if we'll _ever_ be able to understand each other."

That was not the most comforting of truths, but there was still some paradoxical kind of relief to speaking it out loud after so long, of the same kind that one would feel after doing away with a secret that had somehow accumulated between oneself and the very people one would want to tell _everything_ -

The old trope of the lonely, tormented superhero who had to keep their significant other from finding out about their secret identity and the ensuing drama was so ubiquitous in fiction as to be frequently derided as formulaic and cliched, but even so, movie directors, comic artists and writers alike kept coming back to it all the time, because it spoke to one of the most universal experiences of both artists and audiences:

At its core, the 'secret identity ploy' is not so much about the dangers of fictional crime fighting or the stress of organizing the games of hide and seek, but about the fundamental human need to share your life, thoughts and feelings with the people you loved , be they your family, friends, comrades or significant others.

When they trusted and cherished someone, a person would feel compelled to be as honest as possible with them, and as a corollary, there was a certain degree of tension and anxiety inherent in keeping something, _anything_ from those near and dear, even if it was for a very good reason, such as to protect the other person's feelings – as a natural, intrinsic desire, this was so engrained that we could not even picture an idealized superhero to be exempt from us, but for most of us, our reasons are often rather less heroic; We might be tempted to keep quiet in order to avoid conflict, or because we are afraid that we wouldn't be accepted if we revealed the truth, and so these things that we cannot speak about come with us, like the tiny pointy stones accumulated under the soles of ones' sandals -

That is why we describe the best mentors and friends as those whom we can "tell just about anything" why we said that our closest friends and family "know us better than anyone else" and why we characterize our most closely guarded secrets as those "we would not even tell our mother."; This is also why insecure souls around the globe (and probably the universe) frequently overreact over the tiniest, most trivial details that their significant others fail to mention, fearing that the desire to communicate may have evaporated along with the love -

In fact, he would bet just about anything that Pidge could have directed him to some scientific paper describing scientific proof for the existence of somesuch behavioral priniple if he were to consult her on the subject, but more than anything else, that would have proven that she was the kind of person who would actually need such hard, outside proof in order to believe or understand the kinds of things that many other people would never even think of researching if they could so easily be confirmed in one's everyday experiences, not even so much as a consequence of the extraordinary smarts, diligence and insight that one might think of as her strengths, but of the in themselves neutral quirks and preferences that made up her unique way of being – For Pidge, looking at things in terms of abstract logical explanations was simply her primary means of seeing the world as well as the preferred method through which to understand it; She applied it even to to mundane parts of everyday experience because for her, it very much _was_ such a part.

Lance, however, was one of those 'other people'. If explicitly prompted, he supposed that he could have shored up his argument with specific experiences from his social life or a variety of anecdotes starring all of his family, but it struck him as a simple truth that was readily apparent and easily self-consistent in and of itself, something he knew deeply and naturally, much like a fish might know the basics of swimming –

Perhaps it was a somewhat stronger truth for him as a particularly gregarious person with an unusually strong need to involve others in his life, but insofar as it boiled down to the basic nature of trust, Lance had all reason to believe that Keith should just as much of it as he did given the way that he and Shiro often confided in each other -

And that, perhaps explained why Lance felt just the slightest bit closer to his fellow Paladin after listing all the ways in which they weren't.

Perhaps he had never really allowed himself to really feel or acknowledge the wall between them – at most, he had perhaps perceived it as a challenge to be broken down by force, and read the simple truth of their differences as a taunt about everything he was not.

But now that he had faced up to it's existence, he seemed to have arrived in the same world that Keith dwelt in, a world in which that wall was a hard component of reality to which he'd gotten used a long, long time ago.

Nothing about what Lance just said seemed all that new or surprising to him

"I guess that's just a fact of life..." he muttered, as one would of the shortening days in winter. "I really _am_ different. Not just from you, but from _everyone_. I'm unlike anybody else in the universe. There had never _been_ anything like me until my parents came along and changed that.

And in a way, I always knew that, somehow, but now it's as plain as day..."

At that, his eyes darted to his still blood-encrusted armor and lifted his hand from its gashes in order, inspecting the maroon staining his hand more than he was really showcasing it to Lance, but even so, the gesture had the effect of calling his attention to it.

"Come to think of it, we should probably put a proper bandage on that..."

At that, there was some brief, instinctive recoiling, a brief, abortive motion during which the Red Paladin's hand went not quite as far as to dart back to the wound it had been covering, but very much ended up en route to that particular direction until Keith stopped himself midway, his conscious mind interceding when it couldn't procure any logical reason to justify that this action be completed.

"C'mon man, there's nothing to be ashamed of. After we've dealt with planet-sized creatures and people with tentacles for hands, your weird alien blood is honestly not that big of a deal..."

"I don't think the people back at the garrison would say the same.. besides, the tentacle hand people were not the ones who almost enslaved the entire universe..."

"You're still you, and we know it." Lance said firmly as he gathered the bandages, ointments and desinfactants at his side before moving to remove his fellow Paladin's armor.

"That's just it. I'm still the same. This is what I've always been. No wonder that I never really fit in anywhere..."

"Why do you always think that everything about you is somehow the result or the evidence of how there's something terribly wrong about you? So you're a bit of a misfit. So what? There's lots of those on Earth and most of them are run of the mill humans as far as I know. It might just be your personality or somethin'. As for the people of the universe, most of them are probably grateful to you for all you've done to help kick Zarkon's ass... And what about your father, anyways? He's the human one, right?"

"He was... I'm afraid I gave him nothing but worries. I was always getting into scrapes and fights..."

"No wonder you lived in the desert, he must have been afraid that your secret would be discovered if you bumped your knee..."

That thought just seemed to reinforce Keith's gloomy disposition. "We were only together for a short time, though it wasn't his fault... and ever since he died, I've been pretty much on my own. I stayed in a couple of different places before I was old enough to go back to my father's shack, but never for long. I mean, I can't really blame them. I was always getting into trouble, and talking back and stuff – I might have been acting out a bit. I know I'm not the world's most charming or sociable person... some of them were probably frightened of me, or they must have thought I was creepy... I suppose it must have showed somehow, that I wasn't 100% human...

When I got older, I didn't know what to with myself. I guess I was looking for more direction or purpose, something I was actually good at."

"You have a _lot_ of things that you're good at, Keith."

"That just means I have no excuse for never actually getting anywhere."

"You were top of the class at the garrison!"

"Yeah, and then, I flunked out... back then, when I first discovered flying, I thought there was finally something I could do, something I could _be_ other than just a problem child who can't do anything right. I didn't fit in there, either, but I thought that didn't matter as long as I had something meaningful to focus on. Then, I met Shiro. I think at first, the Instructors only told him to talk to me so they could tell me to do what they want, so when they first introduced us, I thought he was going to be just another person who was going to look at me as some problem that needed to be fixed, but instead... he was Shiro."

Though he couldn't say that he knew him as well as Keith did, Lance had spent enough time around the veteran astronaut to know why that one word was sufficient.

"He took me under his wing and told me I could be just like him... I think it was the first time since my father's death than anyone really believed in me..."

"No wonder you're so close..." Lance stated, a long way away from his prior jealousies on that matter." No wonder you took it so hard when the whole Kerberos deal happened..."

"All I did was to waste any faith that Shiro ever placed in me!" Keith exclaimed, unable to keep his voice down. "I _knew_ he would have wanted me to carry on in his stead, but I just couldn't do it. I couldn't stand to stare at the walls and hallways and all the places that reminded me of him... I It's just as you say. I'm a hothead and a dropout, and I couldn't do anything right, now even the one thing I was supposed to be good for..."

"No, that's not true. That's not what I meant! I mean, I did say it, but I say a lot of things sometimes...

What I mean is, I think I owe you an apology."

"What brought this on of all sudden? Are you still feeling dizzy?"

"No. I mean it. I'm sorry for calling you a dropout. I didn't know you were so upset about that..."

"About flunking out of school? Space school?"

"I suppose I _should_ have known. I didn't think about it. I think totally got the wrong impression of you back then... or maybe I wasn't really fair to you to begin with. I never thought things through from your point of view, and as much as I want to say that it was all just a misunderstanding, that would be only half the truth. Maybe some part of me _wanted_ you to be some stuck-up jerk, because-... because I was jealous of you."

"Jealous...? Of me? Why would _anyone_ -"

"Maybe... maybe because we're not as different as I used to think."

"What is _that_ supposed to mean?"

"Well, for one thing, we both used to really admire Shiro. I didn't get to see him up close like you did, but all the cool stuff he did would be on television all the time, and he was really cool in his interviews. I only joined the garrison because I wanted to be just like him. That wasn't the only reason though.

I guess it some way, my life back home really _was_ like a total opposite of your situation. You're not just an only child, but the only one of your kind... I have a huge family with many brothers and sisters. I guess that's why I can be too trusting sometimes, because they were always looking out for me and making sure I was alright. I was really the baby of the family, and I'm not gonna lie, that was a really sweet deal when I was actually a baby, but as I got older, I didn't always want to be the one depending on them... so I figured if I went out there, did some cool space adventure stuff and got really popular, I'd finally be pulling my own weight, and I wouldn't be just the baby anymore...

I guess you can say that I was looking for something to do with my life. To find my own thing and be my own man, you know?

I can't say I've found it yet, I suppose it's easier said than done. I had a lot of ideas, but they didn't all hold up to reality. As expected of the spoiled youngest sibling, I guess. My siblings mom and sibling always heaped lots of praise on me since I was everyone's favorite baby, so I thought I must be pretty awesome, but when I got to the garrison, everyone there was like super awesome, and then there was you. You were our best fighter, you were a better pilot than me, the instructors were all over you...

From where I was standing, it looked like you had everything I ever wanted, and I suppose I took that personally..."

"It's not like I was trying to beat you. No offense, I barely knew you existed at the time."

"I know! I know! The whole time, I had no idea what you were going through. I got so wrapped up in competing with you that I never actually tried talking to you! And then you got expelled...

Looking back, I can't help to think that it was all stupid. The only reason I was so jealous of you to begin with is that I thought you were super awesome! I should have tried being friends with you instead – I mean, in the end we were both into flying, we were both huge fans of Shiro, and I we were both sort of looking for our own place in the world...

But I was afraid that I wouldn't measure up. I couldn't believe that a total badass like you would want to be friends with a big mouthed poser like me... I thought that if I kept competing with you, you would totally _have_ to pay attention to me, but I guess you had other things to worry about at the time. I can't help but think that it was a total waste! If only I'd actually talked to you-"

"It's not like I talked to _you_ either... It's true that people used to avoid me, but after the first few times, I figured that it would always be like that no matter what I did, so I ended up focusing on other things... "

"So you didn't thought I'd want to be friends with you either?"

"I can't say I ever really tried to make friends with anyone, and even if I did, I wouldn't know how to begin. The only friend I had back then was Shiro, and he sought _me_ out. That whole talking thing doesn't really come naturally to me, and I never got much experience, either... It looks easy when you do it – no matter where we go, you always get along with everyone, and everyone always laughs at your jokes... "

"It didn't work on you though... I can't help but think that if only I'd talked to you after the Kerberos incident, things would have been different..."

Keith seemed to give this a good long think, put ultimately chose to put the resulting thoughts out of his mind, facing up as he did so.

"I don't think it matters in the end. We might never see the garrison or anyone affiliated with it ever again and even if we did, I doubt that you'd return there as students. We're both Paladins of Voltron now... _That's_ what we can do with our lives for now... both of us."

"Thanks... I've got you all wrapped up, by the way. You can put your armor back on. It's still ripped up though, and so is mine, I wouldn't stay out there for too long... If we're gonna attack, we'll have to do it with our lions..."

"They should still be scouting for us, so we should probably get out of here and surprise them before they surprise _us._ I'm sorry that I'm asking you to fight in a state like this, but I don't think we have a choice..."

"Eh. That Altean First Aid Pack turned out pretty rad, and besides, you're pretty beaten up yourself. I know that's a bit less reassuring from a guy who was crying for his mom earlier, but, what sort of Paladin would I be if I let you get out there on your own?"

"...if it helps, think of this as getting one step closer to seeing your mom again..."

"Yours might be somewhere out there, too, you know?" Lance added as he picked up his helmet. "I mean, she's probably got fangs and claws and stuff, but if there's one thing we know about her, it's that she was one of the good ones. She was with the blades everything. She might still be, fighting Zarkon and all that. Wait till she learns how you picked a fight with him and lived. She might gift you a giant axe or kill some huge creature in your honor, or whatever it is that Galra mothers do with their sons...

I'm warning you though, if she's anything like a human mother, you're probably grounded forever. "

Keith shook his head. "The Blade of Marmora take a lot of risks on their missions. If she said she would return, and never came back, it's probably because never made it back..."

"It seems hard to believe that she'd volunteer for a suicide commando when she's got a kid waiting at home, though..."

"Maybe she had no choice, or maybe she was bound by honor or duty... Maybe that's exactly why she did it, because becoming a parent reminded of her responsibility toward the universe..."

"Or maybe she was completely confident that she'd make it back until she acted without thinking at some point... No offense to your mom and all, but even you've got to admit that going on some dangerous cloak and dagger venture _is_ pretty reckless."

There was not much Keith could say to defend a woman whose face he'd never seen and whose mention elicited a rather ambiguous lump of emotions – even his earlier speculations had not carried much in the way of conviction.

Lance, being Lance, somehow managed to have a somewhat different view on the matter:

"Either way, I wouldn't be surprised if she turned out to be a whole lot like you."

To be honest, Keith didn't know whether to feel worried or comforted; He wasn't sure if being _like_ her would be a good thing or a bad thing.

Lance, however, seemed to have been aiming for comfort:

"Even if they got her, she might just have been captured. For all we know, she may be sharing a cell with Pidge's Dad right now... Besides, you might have other relatives. Like a cousin or something..."

Lance was rather conscious that he was probably succumbing to what, to Keith, might look like his usual naïve optimism, but he figured that _someone_ had to bring up what was after all a real possibility.

"Could be..." Keith admitted, without any indications that the thought provided him much in terms of hope or respite. "...but who says that they agreed with her choices? Maybe they're withl the Empire... Even if we don't end up fighting them, they might not exactly welcome a long lost relative who looks like _this."_

He gestured to his face for emphasis. "Not even if- or _especially_ if I have their blood."

"That would be their loss, really... If they would reject their own flesh and blood for reasons like that, they're probably jerks anyways. But who knows? They might change their minds once they actually meet you. You _are_ their family after all..."

"I wonder... I mean, for all this talk of me being Galra, when they look at me, it must be all the human bits that stick out at them... I mean all over the universe, there's people who'd be frightened of me and wouldn't trust me because I'm part Galra, but even if I could find my own family, they might reject me because I'm part _human_. I'd rather not meet them if we'll just end up having to fight, but I will if I have to... And even if they did want something to do with me, I probably wouldn't fit in with them any more than I did back on earth...

In the end, I'm not really one or the other, and I never will be..."

"Is this about what that dude with the axe said? I guess your folks would have to help you with reaching the high shelves, but considering that you exist, us humans can't look that bad to their eyes."

"What is _that_ supposed to mean?"

"Nothing, really... I mean I don't really have personal experience, so I won't claim to know more about this than you do. It's hard to argue with some of what you're saying, but at the same time, I don't think that's the only way to look at it. You could say that you're not really one or the other, but it wouldn't it be just as right today that you're... both? Or maybe you're your very own, brand new sort of... being. I mean you're right in what you said earlier. There has never been anyone else like you. You're the only one there is. Some people would say that's pretty damn special.

"And by 'some people, you mean yourself?" he replied, raising an irritated eyebrow.`

"Hey! I was basically saying that you're awesome, you know, because it's a nice thing to do. I might not be so generous again!

Besides... You might be the only one like that for _now_ , but when you think about it, you're really just the first. Once spaceflight really takes off back on earth, people like you will probably be all over the place. One day, you might be totally boring, if you'd rather do that!

Who knows, I might even help you out with that. There's no shortage of shapely alien babes out here – maybe one of these days, one of them will be the new miss blue lion!"

"Is that all you ever think of?"

"Hey! It didn't do your old man any harm! If anything, you should follow his example and loosen up a little... if she agreed to come to Earth with me, we'd have lot of half-alien babies! Who knows, I might even make you the godfather."

"...Me?!"

"Sure! You could share your experience with them... as long as you promise that you won't try to teach them sword fighting until they're at least past puberty. I mean, I could always ask Pidge, but she'd probably insist that I name my kid 'Mister Spock' or something like that..."

And here, Lance should score another unexpected victory. He'd added a snicker at the end of his own punchline so it wouldn't float around in the void by itself, never expecting anything else.

It took him a while to realize what was happening, in part because Keith tried to contain it at first, but in the end he couldn't restrain his laughter any more than any of his other impulses, and before Lance knew it, he was vigorously joining in – Even so he was the first to catch his breath again.

"...this turned into a bit of an unexpected heart to heart talk, didn't it..."

"I guess so..." all things considered Keith appeared surprisingly embarrassed by his earlier display. He must not get to do this very often.

"We should probably still get ready to attack though, since we're all patched up now... but first there's one last thing I want to say. I know I talk a lot and I've been blabbering at you for quite a while, but, that thing I sad earlier, about how I should have made friends with you instead of picking a fight?"

"Yes...?"

He really did not seem to suspect where this was going. Must be an Alien after all.

"...would you say that it's to late for that?"

"For what`?"

"Just to be friends and all... Peace? "

"...Peace..."characteristically, it took Keith a few moments to realize that he was supposed to shake the Hand he was being offered – but shake it he did.


End file.
